On Macaroni and Cheese

I love a good old pasta dish, filled with pasta and cheese and some sort of sauce. My favourite pasta dish is my own homemade macaroni cheese, made with whatever pasta I have in my cupboard, a bechamel sauce with an egg yolk in it, mustard and plenty of cheese. The cheese in question varies depending on what day of the week it is and how many sandwiches my cheese-loving sister has eaten, but still, it’s always good.

The recipe itself is simple. You boil your pasta for as long as it needs, adding salt and a splash of oil and white vinegar to the pan to stop it from sticking, then you make a basic bechamel sauce by melting butter, mixing in flour until it forms a paste, whisking in milk over heat as it thickens, then adding cheese, mustard, seasoning and an egg yolk. Throw the two together and boom, mac’n’cheese.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be macaroni and cheese. My favourite kind of pasta is the seashell pasta, since it’s like eating a bunch of edible cups all filled with sauce. Twisty pasta is good as well. Spaghetti not so much, simply because it breaks into shards and goes everywhere when not cooked.

The great thing about macaroni cheese? You can add a ton of things to it. I like to chop up mushrooms, onion and bacon, fry them all up and add them to my pasta and sauce, because that’s absolutely amazing. Grilled chicken is nice as well. Those packs of frozen sweetcorn, peas and carrot are also nice, I just wish I could get them in tins so I didn’t have to boil extra water. Heck, cook up some mince meat with onions and chopped tomatoes and make yourself a weird lasagna wannabe. Because not everyone has time to layer sheets of lasagna pasta, mince and sauce and bake it in the oven for a while.

Doesn’t have to be a white sauce either. Tomato sauces work great. Heck, by cooking up onions, mushrooms and a tin of chopped tomatoes, you can really easily make a ton of sauces, adding different spices depending on your tastes. A bit of paprika for beef mince, or some mixed herbs perhaps for a whiter meat.

A particularly weird thing that I do and I don’t expect anyone else to try is to get a tin of sardines (or other tinned fish) in tomato sauce and mix that into my macaroni and cheese, alongside some red pesto and tomato puree. It’s weird but I like it.

Not everyone’s a big fan of pasta though. In my house, I’m the only one. Everyone else complains they’re sick of pasta because about 10 years, ago, we had a lot of pasta for easy, cheap meals. It seems I’m the only person who got over that. But whenever I’m cooking dinner, I’ll always have some other carb available for them. There’s a reason why there’s always a bag of frozen chips in the freezer.

But ready made pasta dishes are horrible. They give pasta a bad name. Heck, they give ready meals a bad name. I bought a Kraft macaroni cheese ready meal once, having been told that Kraft ready meals were alright on a budget and I still regret that purchase to this day. For my €2.00, I could have bought a 500g bag of pasta and a jar of pesto and had a far tastier meal. This was me following the instructions exactly, mind you.

Sadly, for some, they might be a necessary evil. But pasta, unlike a lot of other dishes featured heavily in ready meals (curry, pies, etc.), is incredibly easy to cook. If you want to use a ready-made sauce, sure, go ahead, but at least try and make the pasta and any secondary ingredients yourself.

Seriously, pasta is easy. The trick is to heavily salt the water. I put a bit of olive oil and white vinegar in (about a teaspoon of each) because that SEEMS to make the pasta not stick. But really, you just want to stir the pasta every 4-5 minutes and that should do the job. Oh, and taste your pasta. Take a bit out, blow on it to cool it down and eat it. Everyone likes pasta differently, so don’t be afraid to taste things.

Unfortunately though, it’s not always fast to cook. I don’t know why, but pasta where I live seems to take forever to cook.