Food Adventures: Mac and Cheese

Good ol' Mac 'n' Cheese.

My diet generally consists of noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner (slight exaggeration - I don't wake up in time for breakfast, ha) but from time to time I do like to venture outside my comfort zone and try to cook something new. 

Today, I came back from my lecture, starving and sleepy with a massive mac and cheese craving so I thought I would just make my own instead of buying it. How hard could it be? It's called mac and cheese, so all I need is macaroni and... cheese, right? I had all the necessary ingredients (i.e. I "borrowed" half from my flatmate, Yan) and I found a recipe on the BBC Good Food website called "Best-ever Macaroni Cheese". Best-ever?? Expectations were high; it had a 5 star rating and claimed a 10 minute preparation time so I thought this would be a perfect quick dish to pop in the oven whilst I had a quick nap. The operative word being "thought". Oh how wrong was I. 

The font sucks but it was the only generator I could resize the text la.

I guess my first clue that it would all go horribly wrong should have been the fact that the ingredients called for 'spiral pasta' as opposed to macaroni. At the time, I just thought it was perfect because that was the only pasta I (i.e. Yan) had in the flat. Alas, it was a sign of the chaos to come. 

So, right off the bat, I already disobeyed the instructions by not having chunks of bread. My carbs consist solely of noodles and rice, I barely ever have bread in stock. This was just a minor ting since it had an extra tip at the bottom which said you can use "trimmed field mushrooms" instead. What even are field mushrooms? Don't mushrooms grow in a field any way? Whatever, I just used the mushrooms I already had, i.e. chestnut mushrooms. 

What even are field mushrooms anyway??

I rebelled again with the garlic... the recipe recommended only one clove but as an avid garlic enthusiast, the only obvious thing to do was to use 6 cloves. Wild child, I know. The cooking of the cheese sauce was where I think it all started to go wrong. I think I melted my butter far too quickly so by the time I added the flour, the roux (?) couldn't really happen because there was definitely less butter in the pan than what I'd started off with... Also, I think my excessive garlic melee had absorbed most of the butter. When it came time to add the milk "until you have a lump-free sauce" I was in panic mode. How does one jump from having a chunk of hot dough to a lump-free sauce? I NEED MORE INSTRUCTIONS. 

Basically, the sauce was a one-way ticket to lump central. I even started using an actual whisk to try and get rid of the lumps but it didn't really work... Come to think of it, some of the lumps were probably due to all the extra garlic but still... lumpy sauce. Not even google could salvage this lumpy mess (I googled "lumpy cheese sauce fix" and it told me to make a roux... I'm in the process of making a roux! My roux is lumpy! What now?!?!) At this point, I'm not really sure what I did but this sauce was dripping everywhere and I had to shout at it a bit. Generally, when you feel the need to shout at your cooking, it's not a good sign. To be honest, I don't even know why I attempted my own cheese sauce again, after my previous debacle trying to make cauliflower cheese (it ended up more like cauliflower with a cheesy dough on top), but I guess I was feeling ambitious.

Another mishap was when I was draining the pasta, a quarter of it fell into the sink and I was very upset (as a student, food wastage pains me) so I did the logical thing of fishing it out of the sink and washing it... I know I know, that's pretty gross but the sink was empty and clean (I hope) plus I washed the fallen pasta (don't worry, I threw away any that was too close to the plug hole) and it was going to be baked anyway so it's fiiiine... Whilst this was happening, I'd left the sauce on the hob in the hopes of it melting into some form of smoothness but in the middle of picking up the pasta from the sink (which was still hot btw, ouch) I noticed an odd semi-cheesy smell. I looked over and the pan had this massive sauce bubble over it... it had somehow developed some 'skin' on top and blown up into a giant bubble of not-cheese (I still hadn't added the cheese yet which is why it was only a semi-cheese smell).

In the end, I just gave up with the de-lumpifying and added the cheese in the hopes that it would mask the lumpiness but I ran into some misfortunes here as well because I'd frozen my sliced gouda (I'd frozen sliced cheese before and the slices would just 'snap' apart) but this time the cheese had somehow frozen into a block so I spent about 10 minutes desperately scraping the cheese slices off the block with my fingers. I was seriously hating life at this moment in time.

The moral of the story is: don't be a smartass and try to make your own cheese sauce. It's just not worth it. 10 out of 10 would not recommend, just go and buy a ready meal mac and cheese for pennies. Don't be a hero. It always leaves your kitchen a mess as well, the cheese sauce just likes to stick to everything and drip on all your surfaces. 

Aftermath.

My initial plan of preparing this dish in 10 minutes and cooking it in the oven for 40 minutes was completely dashed. By the time I put the dish into the oven I was no longer hungry nor sleepy, leaving me in an existential crisis and questioning what I'm doing with my life. 

In retrospect, I probably misinterpreted the cooking time as 'time in oven' and their estimated cooking time probably included both baking and sauce-cooking but my optimistic brain clearly thought sauce-cooking time was part of the preparation... Either that or I am just tragically slow at cooking... (probably both).

With all that said, the mac and cheese did turn out pretty tasty and looked verrryyy niiiiceeee so I guess all that effort wasn't for nothing...

Ok, so it fixed up pretty well. But you were a pain to cook dammit!

Of course I had to add my trusty hot sauce to the mac 'n' cheese!

Mmmm looks good even when destroyed.

TL:DR: Mac 'n' Cheese took way longer than expected to cook. Cheese sauce is pain in the butt to make. Turned out pretty good though. I'd rate this recipe 6/10... The finished product was nice but I could have had this in 5 minutes and fit in a nap if I'd bought this as a ready meal, sigh!