Going out back today, I discovered there were a whole mess of these:
So I grabbed them before anything else could. I have more tomatoes than I can use. Several bigger varieties are rotting on the vine. I cannot tell you how sad that makes me.
I originally thought I might make two 8x8" pans of this dish and freeze one for another night, since these days I'm not home at dinner time on Tuesday or Thursday nights. (That's a conundrum to discuss another time.) But when I looked over the recipe, I realized that's it's actually not that kind of casserole. Because of the need to preserve the integrity and flavor of the cheese, it seems like you pretty much have to bake it right after you've assembled it. So I figured I would just score some (hopefully) delicious leftovers for lunch this week.
I have not had good luck with homemade mac 'n cheese in the past. It's ALWAYS too milky. But here's what came out of my oven tonight:
If anything, there wasn't enough sauce here, but actually I think it was almost perfect! The focus is pretty much all on the cheese: fontina, gorgonzola, and pecorino romano (the recipe called for parmesan, too, but I didn't feel like buying it when I already had plenty of romano). And the texture was everything I wanted it to be: crispy noodles on top, gooey cheesy pockets throughout.
However, I'm not going to post the recipe just yet because there are still some kinks I need to work out. For starters, the original called for heavy cream and it really seems like you could get away with half and half here. Also, it was a bit too salty, so next time I'm going to try it without adding any salt and using homemade bread crumbs instead of the packaged Italian ones I happened to have on hand. Finally, the writers included a variation where you add tomatoes and I'm pretty sure I won't be able to resist trying that.
But if you're interested in this version, the basic idea is: cook some pasta until it's very al dente. Meanwhile, make a bechamel sauce with a tablespoon each of butter and flour, then 1 1/2 cups of cream. Put the drained pasta into a bowl, then put /14 cup each of fontina and gorgonzola on top, plus about 3/4 cup of romano. Add some fresh Italian herbs if you've got 'em. Pour the bechamel over everything, then cover it immediately with a lid of some sort to keep the heat in for a couple of minutes. Stir it all up, then bake for 7 minutes at 500 degrees.
Anyway, all I knew going into dinnertime tonight was that I was, at long last, going to make the Italian version of mac 'n cheese that I discovered in my America's Test Kitchen cookbook. No plans for vegetables. I'm testing my hypothesis that if I just make a habit of grabbing the good-looking veggies and fruit when I go shopping and combine those with whatever I may have in the garden, I can pretty much ad-lib the veggies when it gets to be dinner time. In my fridge, I found some spring mix on its last legs and some iceberg lettuce with barely one leg left. Mixed it up with the little darlings you see above, some carrot slices, some homemade croutons (otherwise known as toast), and a nice red wine vinaigrette. We ate it all.
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