Mac and Cheese Lorraine

Oh, Rachael Ray: when will you learn that we aren't all professional chefs? This meal says "mac and cheese" in it and "lorraine" - in this case that means smoked bacon - so it must be simple and delicious, yes? Well, it's also too complicated for one person to manage easily. So grab your favorite cooking buddy and come along. This meal is three parts: two simple and one difficult. All of these parts can (and should) happen simultaneously, which is why I recommend a cute and capable partner.
The gentleman that I am, I took charge of the pasta and bacon and left the hard part to Marcella. Simply boil your favorite short-cut pasta and a fair quantity of smoked bacon. Remove the bacon from the frying pan or skillet and then add and caramelize the onions (about 10 minutes or so). For the last minute, add the white wine and cook it together or skip this part if you don't have white wine ready. The complex part is the cheese sauce. Melt the butter into a saucepan over medium heat and whisk in the flour. Oh, and that part is impossible; good luck. After a minute, whisk in the chicken stock and milk. Bring this to a boil, cooking for a few more minutes until thick. Season with salt and pepper and stir in the cheese. Add nutmeg, mustard, and more salt and pepper. When this is finished, mix together the pasta and onions and stir in the sauce. Top each with bacon and enjoy!
The ingredients for Rachael Ray's Mac and Cheese Lorraine are:

• a pound of short-cut pasta
  
• a half pound of bacon, chopped up (more bacon is always better)
  
• a tablespoon of olive oil for the pan in which we cook the bacon
• two onions (less, if you want, but this much is actually OK), quartered and thinly sliced
• a half cup of dry white wine (optional)
  
• two tablespoons of butter
• two tablespoons of flour
• a cup of chicken stock
• a cup of whole milk
• two cups of shredded Gruyère (this cheese just keeps showing up, doesn't it?)
• a little grated nutmeg
• a tablespoon of Dijon mustard
  

Sesame Noodles with Shredded Chicken

Oh, I'm so lazy. I have been cooking, at least for the weekends I've been in town. This meal was from the 17th of August, sent to me by my mother in a Cook's Illustrated newsletter. I really enjoy sesame-based Asian meals and this was no exception. Cooked in two parts, the sauce itself is the most complicated. The recipe calls for mixing these ingredients in a blender or food processor, but I've yet to acquire either. So in a bowl I mixed peanut butter, minced garlic, ginger, soy sauce, the rice vinegar, Tabasco, sugar, and some sesame seeds. From the boiling pot (see below), I added tablespoons of water until this sesame oil mixture was soft enough to stir well.
Boil the Asian noodles (yeah right, or spaghetti). In the meantime, spray a cooking sheet with vegetable oil. Place the chicken breasts on the sheet and broil until the chicken is lightly brown (or at least cooked throughout). Once removed from the oven, let the chicken cool and cut it up into smallish pieces. Drain and rinse the noodles with cold water. I know, weird right? But this meal is basically served cold. Toss the noodles with the chicken and cover with the sesame oil sauce you made earlier. Then add scallions and shredded carrot and cover with more sesame seeds. Eat!
The ingredients list for Cook's Illustrated's Sesame Noodles with Shredded Chicken is:

• a 1/4 cup or so of sesame seeds
• a 1/4 cup of chunky (or smooth) peanut butter
• 2 garlic cloves (minced or through a garlic press, if you're fancy)
• a tablespoon of ginger (fresh or not)
  
• 5 tablespoons of soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons of rice vinegar
• a teaspoon of hot pepper sauce (like Tabasco)
• 2 tablespoons of light brown sugar (or regular sugar, really)
• a pound and a half of boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• a pound of fresh Asian noodles (or spaghetti)
• 2 tablespoons of actual sesame oil
• 4 scallions, sliced somehow
• a medium carrot, grated
  

Pasta Stir-Fry

I am so unbelievably behind. This simple meal was from the 20th of July. I'm going to power through it and then through the next so I can catch up. Pasta stir-fry is an easy Italian/Asian blend (and you know my penchant for fused genres). It requires preparing three separate ingredients at once and then mixing them together.
If you can get a friend to help, this will go much easier. We are preparing - at the same time - the pasta, the chicken, and the stir-fried vegetables. Boil the pasta to al dente in salted water and drain when finished. Slice and then cook (or cook and then slice) the chicken. Heat the canola oil in a large skillet or wok adding the onion, red pepper, ginger, and eggplant. Let this cook for a minute and then add the garlic, broccoli, tomatoes, and soy sauce. I love the smell of cooking soy sauce. After a couple more minutes, add the drained pasta and chicken. If you can, aim for the pasta to be finishing the same time as the chicken. That is, right as the vegetables have simmered for a few minutes. Toss this around and cook it for another minute, then serve.The ingredients for this pasta stir-fry ("courtesy" of Food Network's website) are:

• a package of linguine (whole-wheat, if you choose)
• 2 tablespoons of canola oil
• a medium onion, sliced
• a red bell pepper, also sliced
• a 1-inch piece of ginger, peeled and diced (I just used a liberal amount of ginger spice)
• half a small eggplant, sliced into small chunks
• 2 cloves of garlic, finely sliced
• a cup of broccoli florets (if frozen, thawed)
  
• a 15-ounce can of diced tomatoes
• 2 tablespoons of soy sauce
• a chicken breast, cooked and sliced
• 2 scallions, sliced (for garnish, if you choose)
  

Crab and Corn Chowder with Pasta

In all fairness, Rachael Ray calls this "Crab and Corn Chowda-Mac", as a mix of New England meals: corn chowder with crab meat and mac and cheese. How New England is mac and cheese? Don't ask. But, I live here now and I'm trying more seafood items, so this seems like a pretty easy way to nail all my goals. A forewarning: the quantity of ingredients used and the temperatures I cooked at rendered the milky chowder-ness gone. I'm not sure how liquid Rachael planned this dish to be, but mine ended up more floury. Enough rambling, on with the cooking!

I don't have a lot of pictures for you this time. This meal was actually quite easy to make. Choose a large type of pasta (I chose rigatoni because it was, well, large) and cook it until al dente. This can happen while you're preparing the chowder itself. Slice up some bacon, an onion, celery ribs, and a small red bell pepper. Put the bacon on first to cook for a few minutes, then add the chopped onion and celery, cook a while longer, then add the bell pepper.

Pretty simple so far. The interesting part (and the first part that makes it properly chowder) is to add two tablespoons of flour. This immediately solidifies around the bacon and veggies and results in a stiffer concoction. Adding a cup of stock and a cup of milk will complete the chowderification of our meal. I think, in retrospect, I shouldn't have halved these liquid quantities as I did the majority of Rachael's servings (I'm not feeding four, I'm on a diet). Using a full cup (I used half) of each would have resulted in a far more chowder-like dinner. Anyway, once the milk is bubbling - and, presumably, before it has cooked down - add the crab meat and corn kernels. Heat this through and season with a cup or two of shredded white Cheddar cheese and cayenne pepper.

So, yes, we can observe my real problem. Many pictures of these dishes are turning out unappetizing (I swear they look better in real life). A close flash is necessary to get sharp images, but the flash itself reflects off the often moist food in a terrible way. Turn the flash off and my shaky hands ruin all photos. The proper method of photographing culinary renditions would involve (I suspect) large, indirect lights and a tripod-mounted SLR camera. I, however, do not have a thousand dollars to spend on photographic equipment. Nevertheless, I will do my best to improve future pictures. Oh. Right. The meal. It was actually quite delicious, especially if you enjoy crab meat. Could this meal work without pasta? Certainly. The cheese and bacon add a fantastic flavor (or mask the crab, if that's your thing) and more milk next time would've given us a proper chowder even a native Northerner would be proud of (I'm just faking it). See ya next time!

Drunken Tuscan Pasta

For my first dish of the year, I thought I'd try something that Rachael Ray was kind enough to put a picture of in her book Express Lane Meals: drunken Tuscan pasta. It's just pasta, right? With some extra veggies thrown in? How hard can it be?

Well, when you're starting from zero (zero knowledge and zero preparedness), it's very hard. And expensive. I had to buy a number of ingredients: rosemary (I bought both the "spice" kind and fresh sprigs), portobello mushrooms (pre-sliced, thank you very much), nutmeg, red pepper "flakes", garlic (not knowing what a clove was, I bought three bulbs), spinach, two bottles of red Chianti (I couldn't find Rosso di Montalcino), a couple bottles of EVOO, spaghetti (I couldn't find perciatelli), bacon (what is pancetta?), and Reggianito Parmesan cheese.

For the record, Price Chopper has a horrible selection. Wherever Rachael Ray actually shops for her ingredients, it is most certainly not in the Northeast. Though there was a nice selection of Tuscan wines in my local liquor store, none were Rosso di Montalcino. I purchased two Chiantis instead (one for cooking with, one for drinking). They were both excellent. Price Chopper didn't have any perciatelli either (spaghetti was a recommended substitute) and the cheese requested was only available in one container. I still don't know what pancetta is, but the bacon was awesome.

A note about preparation: I think only one of my large stove-top burners works. But when I tried boiling the red wine/water mix, it seemed to heat OK. I poured the bottle of Chianti into a large pot, added some random amount of water and, once it was boiling, dropped a pound of spaghetti into it. For future reference: half the wine and half the pasta (or less) would be perfectly sufficient. The pasta came out very red, unlike the pictures in Rachael's book.

The pasta boiled very fast and I had to set it aside as I started simmering the vegetables together. With a couple tablespoons of EVOO, I chopped up some bacon and cooked it on a large, stainless-steel skillet. Once it was cooked (and it cooked exponentially: not at all and then very much), I transferred it to a plate to be mixed in later. Into the remaining grease/EVOO mixture, I added the mushrooms and rosemary (forgetting to chop them, ooops). Cooking a little bit (the mushrooms showed no sign of state transition), I moved them to the side of the skillet. I had to keep the temperature down very low on this pan, as a side note. Once Jeremy and Allison arrived (my victims!), I was shown how to cut up garlic cloves (and what the cloves actually were). Adding to these some ground red pepper, I mixed the mushrooms, garlic, and bacon together and, tearing up spinach leaves, tossed them about briefly before turning off the stove top. Here, I must point out, I "forgot" two steps. The pasta cooked so quickly that I had to drain it a number of minutes before. As such, I could not add any of its starchy liquid to this pan. I then forgot to add the cheese (ooops, again).

Mixing the drained pasta with what I had browned in the pan, it was clear that I had far too much pasta for the amount of greens I had thrown together. Nevertheless, I mixed a portion of spaghetti together and divvied it out onto three plates.

My guests were all very polite and told me it was quite delicious. All I know is, I devoured my plate and I don't even like mushrooms or garlic. Mmm. In retrospect, the ratio of greens to pasta was too low. A pound of spaghetti is a lot of spaghetti. And, even though I don't like mushrooms, anything cooked in bacon grease is fantastic. All-in-all, I learned a lot, I have some great ideas for how to do this better, I'm eager to try again, and I will soon have a stocked kitchen and pantry. Win!