Pasta and Cheese

I think it's unfair to call mac and cheese "mac and cheese." I don't think I've eaten an actual macaroni noodle since my freshman year of college (because Easy Mac is so quintessentially dorm food). The best "mac and cheese" is made from fancier noodles (my personal favorite is cavatappi, but rotini is a close second). Anyway, this is pasta and cheese, the recipe for which I took from here. (Basically, I cut it in half and added bacon.)

Pasta and Cheese

Ingredients

1/2 lb pasta (I used rotini)

1/4 cup butter

1/4 cup flour

2 cups milk

3 cups shredded cheese (I used white Cheddar)

salt and pepper

another 1 T butter

1/4 cup panko crumbs

few Tbsp Parmesan

garlic powder

bacon

Equipment

saucepan, pot, pan, stove (and three burners that function at the same time), colander, 9"x13" pan, oven

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 350F. Cook pasta according to package instructions. Start cooking some bacon*. While that's happening, melt the 1/4 cup of butter in the saucepan, sprinkle in the flour and whisk it together. Let it cook for 2 minutes. In the meantime, start the 1 Tbsp butter melting in a pan. Once melted, add the panko crumbs, Parmesan, and a little garlic powder. Stir often until they get golden brown and toasted. Gradually add the milk, whisking as you go until it's smooth. Add the cheese a small handful at a time, letting each one melt before adding the next. Salt and pepper to taste. Drain the pasta and add it to the cheese mixture. Chop up your bacon and stir it in. Pour the whole thing into a greased 9"x 13" pan. Top with the toasted panko. Bake for 12-15 minutes.

*If you cook your bacon on the stove or in an oven, I would strongly recommend making the bacon beforehand. I was raised making bacon in the microwave so that's how I did it. If you try frying the bacon on the stove while you do everything else, you'll have four burners going at once and one of them will be spitting bacon grease at you. If you make it in the oven, you could throw off your oven preheating for baking the pasta at the end.

Yields

3-4 servings

Total time

About 30 minutes

Cleanup rating 6/10

What a pain. Pan, pot, another pan, plus a baking dish. Two of them with cheese all over the place.

Flavor rating 8/10

YUM. Delicious. I haven't eaten homemade pasta and cheese in a very long time. It's a bit of an ordeal to make compared to a lot of the stuff I post here, but totally worth it.

Difficulty rating 6/10

The difficult part of this recipe is doing many things at once. Boiling water for pasta and preheating an oven are easy enough, but you also have to make sure you don't burn flour, milk, cheese, or panko crumbs, while the pasta doesn't boil over. It's quite a bit to keep track of compared to what I normally do for dinner.

Adjustability: high

You can put just about anything you want in your pasta and cheese. I wanted bacon, so I used bacon. I considered broccoli but instead made peas to go with it. You could put other meats or vegetables or whatever in it. You could use any cheese you want. I had some Monterey Jack in the fridge too, and if I had more of it, I would have used Gouda. And, of course, use whatever pasta you want. I like rotini because it holds the cheese in the little grooves.

Make it with...

See the adjustability section, I guess. It's pasta and cheese... it goes with just about everything.