Awesome Mac & Cheese

Stratford, Ontario is a beautiful town, set along the winding river Avon, just like its namesake in
England, and home, of course, to the Stratford Festival. Steve and I have made frequent trips there,
mostly in the years before children arrived, since we both love the theatre. This year, one of my favourite Shakespearean plays is on -- "Much Ado About Nothing", and Gilbert and Sullivan's "Pirates of Penzance" is something I would really love to see as well. Check out their great site here Stratford Festival.

 Stratford has some quaint restaurants (think of getting a "Hamlet" for breakfast at one little place, haha), and it is  also the home of two of the best restaurants I've ever been to, "The Church", (which is in a renovated church, as you might guess, with its upstairs dining room called "The Belfry") (their website is Church Restaurant; and "The Old Prune" (now called "The Prune," and their website is The Prune). They are expensive to eat in, but provide such an amazing dining experience. The Old Prune has a lot of charm, and on one of our very first visits there, we were served our bread by a tiny blond person with pointy ears, who we immediately called "The Bread Elf", and in fact, it was a name that stuck for any person who brought us bread in restaurants in subsequent years, at any restaurant. I also remember it feeling like we were eating in a greenhouse conservatory.  There are other restaurants I'd love to try there, like Rundles, and hopefully we will get there this summer!

Anyway.  The recipe I use for this mac and cheese is based on a dish I had in a pub (I think it is "the Boar's Head Pub"), at least fifteen years ago. If you've made homemade mac and cheese before, you know that using old cheddar makes the best cheese sauce. I highly recommend it. Mild or medium cheddar just makes for a very bland mac and cheese, so why bother. President's Choice makes a few really great products (I was really happy when they came out with their Black Label line of higher end gourmet products, to have some really awesome things to choose from, when you want something that is just a nicer quality). So, for this recipe, I used the PC aged (2years) white cheddar, as well as the black label Fiorelle pasta.

This recipes makes a lot of pasta, and leftovers are so good, it makes the cost worthwhile. Of course, you can use any type of pasta you like, and any old or extra old cheddar. This is what I like for this recipe, and the awesomeness in this recipe comes from adding garlic and rosemary. While I like to use fresh rosemary, dried will do as well, and this is such a great dish for a winter or rainy day (so why did I make it on the first day of Spring, when it's so hot out, you might ask?) Well, I've had the ingredients kicking around for awhile, and I just decided it was time. The great thing about a recipe like this, is once you have the basic cheese sauce, you can add your favourite flavours to it, maybe jalapeno, or sundried tomato, whatever you love. I personally do not like additions like meat or veggies in my mac and cheese, just straight up cheese and pasta. So, here, without further ado, is Awesome Mac and Cheese.

1 500g box of pasta
1 500 gram block of old white cheddar (this yields about 5 rounded cups of cheese, four for the sauce, and one to sprinkle on top), grated (this is where I use my food processor the most, to grate cheese).

1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup flour
4 cups of milk
4 cups of grated cheese

2 T chopped fresh rosemary (or 2t dried)
4-6 garlic cloves
1 t salt
1 t freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup breadcrumbs
1 cup of grated cheese
a little bit of butter

While the water is boiling, and the pasta cooking, make the cheese sauce. Melt the butter over medium heat, and add the garlic and rosemary and cook for a couple of minutes. Add the flour, and stir for another minute or so (adding flour to butter like this is called making a roux), and then adding milk makes it a basic white sauce. After adding the milk, stir frequently for five or six minutes, to allow the sauce to thicken. When it is fairly thick, add the salt and pepper, and the cheese and stir until melted. Ta-da. Cheese sauce. I think my basic rule of thumb when making a white sauce or cheese sauce is 1 T butter, 1 T flour, 1 cup of milk and 1 cup of cheese, so really you can make as much or as little as you want for whatever you  might need cheese sauce for, like pouring over cauliflower.... This would also be great between layers of lasagna. Before adding cheese, a white sauce with nutmeg is also known as bechamel, and I do add this to my lasagna, it makes it really nice and creamy and just makes it extra special.

Okay, cook your pasta just a couple of minutes less than recommended, because it will cook even more when you bake it in the cheese sauce and absorb all the yummy garlic and rosemary flavours too. Add the cheese sauce to the pasta (drain first, obviously, otherwise it would be pretty nasty), and sprinkle bread crumbs and cheese over the top, and dot with little blobs of butter. You can add more than I've listed, I would probably use a cup of bread crumbs since I love a nice crunchy top to mac and cheese, but I just had half a cup left and it worked out just fine. Your call. Make it to your taste. That crunchy top had me gagging when I was a kid, back when Kraft Dinner (with pickles!!) was a luxury I had only at my friend's house, and now it's the other way around. Kraft Dinner, yucky, homemade, yummy!!

Bake the mac and cheese at 350 deg. for about half an hour. If the top has not browned nicely, broil for about one minute, and there it is, the best mac and cheese ever. Probably my all-time favourite comfort food. The top photo is blurry, but you get the idea. The bottom photo is better. Try it, you will love it.