Something for everyone

Pasta with Bacon, Cheese, Lemon, and Pine Nuts is described in the New York Times Cooking pages as "a modular meal". With pasta as a base and a variety of garnishes to pass around, diners can add as much or as little of each ingredient as they like. I used fettuccini as the pasta which turned out to be a good choice. Toasted pine nuts, cooked bacon, chopped fresh mint, red pepper flakes, grated Parmesan, and lemon zest were placed on the table in their own vessels so each of us could take as much as we wanted. Both James and I used all the "add-ons" but we were each able to decide how much of each according to our own tastes. Note that my labels include both "bacon" and "vegetarian" which illustrate the versatility of this recipe.

A very good and satisfying meal. We will likely try it again in the summer.

Fancy Comfort Food - Chicken with "a tangle" of noodles

One-Pot Creamy Chicken and Noodles comes from From the New York Times Cooking Pages. It is rather simple, and really is prepared all in one pot, however, it does take two hours. I started by putting some lemon-infused olive oil into our indispensable cast-iron cook pot, placed the whole chicken in, and then dotted with butter. The chicken was seasoned with salt, and lemon pepper (inside and out), and a bit of Paremesan rind was also put inside the cavity. A bunch of garlic cloves (still in their sheathes) were added to the pot as well. This baked in a 500 degree oven for 30 minutes. Then pot was removed to the stovetop, garlic cloves were crushed, and 5 cups of water added and brought to a simmer. Meanwhile the oven temp was lowered to 400. The chicken was placed back in the oven and baked for another hour, whereupon it was again removed to the stovetop so more water, and egg noodles could be added. The noodles and chicken boiled until the noodles were softened and then fresh rosemary was added to the pot. After five minutes several tablespoons of sour cream were added. 

We brought this most appetizing pot to the table with fanfare. I don't believe it would have been possible to have prepared a more tender chicken. We both had seconds, and are looking forward to enjoying the leftovers today for lunch!

Lobstah Mac

Brazenly stolen logo in lieu of a photo of this meal, another that tasted
far better than it looked.

 As we enjoyed this meal (spoiler alert -- this was fantastic), our son asked why I had decided to make it. I did not have a specific inspiration, but it seemed like a special meal that I could pull together with modest effort -- fancy comfort food, if you will.

It was expensive, of course, but I kept reminding myself of the cost and portion size if three of this were to have this in a sit-down restaurant. My only hesitation was that I have tried non-from-a-box mac & cheese before with fairly poor results. A prudent chef would try some plain mac & cheese before involving an expensive add-in, but I decided to trust my instincts. And the internet.

Searching for mac & cheese recipes, I found several options, including one that referenced the plethora of existing options, almost apologizing for adding to the pile. I checked a few different recipes as I prepared this, but that humble poster was my main inspiration. Here is how it played out:

1. Procured lobster from the incomparable Kyler's Catch. I got 2/3 of a pound of mostly tail meat with some claw mixed in for $40. I cut this into 1/2-inch chunks. I told the dog she was not getting any at these prices, but she talked me out of the rubbery tips of a couple claw pieces. She did not seem to be insulted by receiving the less desirable cuts.
2. I heated the oven to 325F and lightly oiled a lasagna pan.
3. I shredded a close to one pound of three cheeses: Monterrey jack, Colby, and sharp cheddar. 
4. I cooked one pound of penne, al dente. A little less cooking is fine -- overcooking is to be avoided. I tossed the pasta with a bit of olive oil and let it rest in the colander while I prepared the sauce.
5. To economize just a bit on dishes, I returned the pasta pot to the stove and using the very lowest heat, melted one stick of butter.
6. Once the butter was melted, I gradually mixed in 1/2 cup of flour. I would normally have used a whisk, but this worked very well with a silicone spatula -- the real hero of this operation.
7. Again keeping the heat very low, I mixed the butter and flour until it was thick and bubbly. I then slowly poured in about 2 cups of milk. Most recipes call for a combination of half-and-half and whole milk. I found that 2% worked fine. Setting some milk aside on the counter early would have been a good move, because this had to heat from a relatively low temperature. 
8. It was only a few minutes, though, before I had a nice, thick sauce. I added black pepper and dry basil. With lobster as with scallops, I like minimal seasonings. But this would be the time to add Old Bay or any other desired spices.
9. I then stirred in about 3/4 of the shredded cheese, with heat still very low. I adjusted it by adding just a bit of milk until the consistency seemed right in my completely amateur opinion.
10. I then stirred in the reserved pasta until coated thoroughly. 
11. I folded in the lobster gently and then transferred the entire contents to the casserole dish. I sprinkled the remaining cheese evenly over the whole dish. 
12. I baked for 25 minutes and rested it in a warm area for 10 more.
13. While the lobstah-mac rested, I cooked some peas for nutritional balance.

This was both delicious and filling -- a great platform for Tabasco and accompaniment to some nice white wines. And I should not have worrried so much about portions. This made dinner for three, and we are about to sit down to lunch with the rest. 

Ricotta Pasta Alla Vodka

This recipe turned out to be a combination of a Vodka Penne recipe that I've been using for about 25 years and a favorite from the early days of this blog Spaghetti with Tomato, Bacon, and Onions.

Ricotta Pasta Alla Vodka comes from the New York Times Cooking Pages. It is more time consuming and a bit more complicated than either of the other two recipes, and not good enough to be worth trying again. I will admit to using a bit too much of the red pepper flakes, but even had I not been heavy handed there, it would have still been just an ok dish.

I was able to use some leftover ricotta that I had from making lasagna on New Years Eve, and it didn't require me to buy any additional ingredients, an important part of my recent meal planning since I don't want to go to grocery store while I am recovering from a bout of Covid.

This was a dinner for one while the rest of my family is traveling. I made enough to have leftovers for lunch today.

One-Pot Vegan Tomato Basil Spinach Pasta

 

This recipe comes from The Ordinary Vegan  webpage. The print out I have is dated June 24, 2015. I found it stuffed between some other things on my cookbook shelf. I have no recollection of how I originally came across this recipe, but when it fell into my hands recently I realized I had everything I needed to make it, so I did. 

 

Although the recipe calls for linguine, I used some tri-colored bow-tie pasta we bought recently at a fancy-schmancy food store while we were traveling in the mid-west. The preparation was easy and quick. Just about everything went into the pot at the start, even the dry pasta. The pot was covered and the liquid was brought to a boil, then reduced to a simmer. The only real prep work was slicing the onion and garlic cloves. The only thing that went in later was the spinach, which was added after seven minutes of cooking. Since this is a vegan dish it did not call for any cheese, but we like cheese so we added a bit of feta to each of our plates.

This had a very peppery flavor, which we both liked. From start to table was about 25 minutes. Easy, quick, delicious.

A pasta recipe I won't be making again

Ricotta cheese and penne pasta were the reasons for choosing this recipe from the 365 Ways to Cook Pasta Cookbook - not because we are particularly enamored of these two ingredients, but because we already had some open ricotta that we did not want to go to waste and, likewise, we had some penne pasta in the cupboard. The other ingredients include fresh basil and fresh tomato (both hard to come by in New England at this time of year) as well as garlic, lemon zest, salt and pepper, and "fruity olive oil" - I used lemon olive oil. I will admit that I would have preferred basil and tomato in season, and I didn't use lemon zest, but rather a lemon pepper seasoning to substitute, but I don't think these reasons were why we decided that it was a once-in-a-lifetime meal. James' assessment that it was too "ricotta forward" is more in line with our thoughts. The recipe is similar to Pasta Fresca which is made with mozzarella and is one of our favorites - eat this; not that.

Pretty Easy Pasta

Sometimes the most important thing I'm looking for in a meal is what I can prepare without buying any additional ingredients. Yesterday was snowy and I had no desire to go out for any reason, but especially not shopping. 365 Ways to Cook Pasta to the rescue! We had a partial box of spaghetti so I flipped through some recipes and found Spaghetti with Walnuts and Parmesan which I was able to prepare in less than 15 minutes.

While the pasta cooked I coated the bottom of my indispensable cast-iron skillet with olive oil and minced and sautéed a garlic clove. After about a minute I added 1/2 cup of chopped walnuts and sautéed a few more minutes. Once the pasta was cooked and drained I mixed the contents of the skillet into the pasta and added shredded Parmesan cheese and some dried parsley. Simple, fast, and delicious. James and I were both impressed with the especially nutty flavor.

Pasta and Poppies

We had bought a large bag of spinach leaves at Costco last week in order to make a family favorite: Mashed Potato Casserole (which is detailed on this post) while our adult child was visiting. There was still an awful lot of spinach so we had been looking for ways to use it before it spoiled. I found this super simple recipe in our good ol' 365 Ways to Cook Pasta. 

There are only six ingredients in this one: butter, garlic, spinach, poppy seeds, fettuccini, and shredded Parmesan cheese. 

While the pasta cooked, I crushed a garlic clove and added it to 4 T of melted butter in the indispensable cast-iron skillet and sautéed. The spinach was went in next and cooked until wilted, then 1 T of poppy seeds was added. Once the pasta was cooked it was tossed in a bowl with the spinach mixture, topped with the Parmesan and served with some crusty bread. I imagine this would pair well with a buttery Chardonnay, but we had it with Malbec because...Malbec.

Photo added by James, who did nothing for this meal except shopping
and eating, but who wanted to give this post a bit of color.
Lacking a photo of the meal,   I found this other
poppy reference, with Miss Judy Garland.

Spinach Lasagna

Our only child came to visit for Christmas. Although he is not a vegetarian, he said he hadn't been feeling it for beef or poultry recently, so for our (otherwise landlocked) Chicagoan we planned a variety of seafood and vegetarian dishes for his visit (more recipes to follow).

Lasagna is a dish we've traditionally enjoyed for the holidays. I used to make the very time-consuming "Everyone's Favorite Lasagne" from 365 Ways to Cook Pasta on Christmas day before we started having Christmas dinner with friends, who also always made (vegetarian) lasagna. We had no idea at our Christmas dinner of 2019 what was to come in 2020. There were of course no get togethers the following Christmas, and the next year our hosts moved out of state. If we had known that there would be no more holiday gatherings at their home we might have done something special in 2019, but alas, here we are. In honor of Christmases past I made a spinach lasagna adapted from another recipe in the the 365 Ways Cookbook.

The recipe calls for spinach lasagna noodles, which I have never been able to find in my local stores, so I used regular egg lasagna noodles, and used actual spinach leaves between the layers. 

Additional ingredients include:

Olive oil

1 garlic clove

28 oz. can plum tomatoes (pureéd)

15 oz. ricotta cheese

1/4 c. grated Parmesan cheese

a bit o' nutmeg

1 egg 

fresh basil 

1 lb. mozzarella (shredded)

While the noodles cooked I sliced and sautéed the garlic in the olive oil. When the garlic was browned it was discarded and the puréed tomatoes were added to the skillet and cooked down for about 20 minutes. Salt and pepper we added to taste.

The egg, nutmeg, Parmesan and ricotta were whisked together in a separate bowl.

The lasagna was assembled thus:

A small amount of the sauce was spread on the bottom of the lasagna pan and four noodles were placed on top. A quarter of the remaining sauce was spread over the noodles and they were sprinkled with basil leaves and a handful the fresh spinach leaves. Another layer of four noodles was placed on top and then layered with the ricotta mixture, some more basil, and another handful of spinach. Another layer of four noodles was topped with the mozzarella, more basil, and more spinach. A final layer of noodles was topped with the rest of the sauce. 

The lasagna baked in a 350 pre-heated oven for 45 minutes, then rested for 15 minutes before serving.

We all enjoyed this, especially our adult child who ate 2/3 of the leftovers for a midnight snack! The taste of the fresh basil came through along with the cheeses. The texture was perfect. Although a bit complicated it was less work than the "Favorite Lasagne" recipe which calls for a long-cook meat sauce. We will add this one to our family "comfort meal" repertoire. 

New Year's Eve dinner - Fettuccini with Chicken and Mushrooms

Welp, 2021 closed much the same way that 2020 did, so as we entered our third year of pandemic James and I spent a quiet evening at home. We managed to stay up until about 10:30 before we decided we'd had all the Netflix excitement two baby boomers could take. We did however, have a lovely meal before we settled in to the boob tube.

We selected Fettuccini with Chicken and Mushrooms from one of the oldest cookbooks on our shelf - 365 Ways to Cook Pasta. The recipe was selected because we had chicken and mushrooms in our larder. It calls for a mix of white button, shiitake, and oyster mushrooms. I only used the first two of these. We had purchased some white mushrooms for another recipe, and the shiitake came from a log James insisted we take with us from a shiitake mushroom farm we visited on Martha's Vineyard - our last trip before the country shut down in March 2020. The log was supposed to have been soaked that spring in order to cause the mushrooms to come out, but that was never done, so were were pleasantly surprised to find a 'shroom growing out of the log earlier in the week. I plucked it to use in our last meal of 2021.

The accidental shiitake mushroom

The recipe itself was of a rather straightforward chicken/pasta/creamy-tomato-sauce variety. Peas were also added to make it a complete meal in itself.

Slow Cooker Chicken Ragù with herbed ricotta.

 

I rarely use the slow cooker. James uses it a few times a year, mostly to make chili, but I don't think I've used it myself more than a handful of times since we received one as a wedding gift 34 years ago. However, when this recipe showed up on my Facebook feed a few weeks ago I decided to give it a try. And I did so, once I remembered to get out the slow cooker early in the morning on the day after I remembered to thaw the chicken. I followed the recipe mostly as written, although I was surprised to discover we were out of tomato paste, so I didn't use it. The only tomato product was a can of crushed tomatoes. I also skipped the carrot. We didn't have any and it seemed unnecessary to go out just to pick up "one small carrot".

As with slow cooker meals once everything goes in, the cook's job is mostly to wait (and salivate) as the cooker does its thing all day. There was a little labor at the end shredding the chicken, but as the recipe suggests it was quite tender, so it wasn't difficult. Topping with the herbed ricotta, along with a sprig of fresh basil made for a lovely presentation. 

Another winner from the New York Times cooking pages.

World's Best Pasta Sauce

This recipe came up on my Facebook feed some time ago from Mental Floss Magazine. The headline reads "The Pasta Sauce Hailed as the World's Best is Surprisingly Easy to Make at Home". Since we had planned on an uninspired dinner of store-bought tortellini it seemed like topping it with the "world's best" sauce would make our meal seem more of a celebration. And as James pointed out: if it's "hailed" you really can't go wrong. It was surprisingly easy to make. The only ingredients are canned whole tomatoes, one onion cut in half, 5 tablespoons of butter, and a bit of salt. Everything went into our cast iron pot and simmered for 45 minutes. The butter melted into the tomato juices and made a nice smooth sauce. The onion was removed and I broke up the tomatoes a bit before serving. It was quite flavorful and complemented the tortellini well. Malbec was naturally our choice for a wine pairing.

Pasta with Sausage, Squash and Sage Brown Butter

The New York Times cooking page never leaves the cook with too much guessing as to what goes into a recipe. The ingredients not mentioned in the name of this dish include olive oil, salt and pepper, and Parmesan cheese. This one took a bit of work with peeling, seeding, and cubing the squash. It also created a lot of dishes to wash. We had a pan to cook the pasta, a colander to drain it, a cutting board, a plate to cool the sausage, our cast iron skillet, and the cheese grater. Not to mention the dishes we ate off of. It did turn out to be a wonderful autumnal meal with a lot of leftovers for lunch.

The full recipe can be found here.

BLT Pasta

This easy dish is just what it sounds like, and perhaps better than it deserves to be. When I asked Pam for suggestions about dinner, she found this NYT recipe in her saved list, and remembered that local bacon was in the freezer from a recent delivery.

The Hiram

The ingredients are few, and I did not worry too much about proportions. As I have seen with other recipes involving spinach, I rightly guessed that the entire 5-ounce bag of arugula would reduce to a reasonable size as it wilted, though writer Colu Henry was correct that it was a bit unwieldy at first, even in Hiram, our rather large indispensable cast-iron skillet. At that stage, rather than stirring in the traditional sense, I lifted large spoonfuls of the pasta from the perimeter of the pan and set it in the center, repeating until regular stirring was manageable.

The recipe also has few steps, but the third step reads like an entire tango. I simplified this a bit, adding the bacon all at once and the reserved pasta liquid as I saw fit. I did not note emulsification or glossiness, but nonetheless had a good sense of when the sauce was ready.

This dish scores very well on the delicious-nutritious-easy-cheap trade-off matrix. My selection of quality local ingredients made it slightly less cheap but still quite reasonable. This paired nicely with a side dish of fresh local strawberries and a well-chilled Pinot Grigio. We are looking forward to the cold leftovers today!

Dying phone battery made for a fuzzy photo of this pleasing dish.

Pepper-forward Pasta

When looking for a dinner idea yesterday, I went to the original intent of this blog -- making use of the unused pages in cookbooks we already own. I headed to our easy chair with The Well-Filled Tortilla and Jane Brody's Good Food Gourmet. Followers of this blog -- or those using the search box at the top of the screen -- will know that we have made very good use of both of these volumes (though most of our Jane Brody references are to her earlier Good Food volume.

Because I had made quesadillas (with cheese!) for lunch, I opened Brody's book first. Because I had recently purchased a few boxes of Rao's penne pasta, I looked at pasta entries in the index, rather than thumbing through the book at random. I quickly found Fusilli with Hot Sausage, and quickly decided that penne would be a very reasonable substitution -- especially since Brody grants "or similar pasta" in the ingredients list.

I followed the directions on page 224 pretty closely, except with regard to proportions. Having purchased a pound of hot italian sausage, I used it all for Brody's first step (my second; see below). I  removed the casings and crumbled the sausage as I cooked it over medium-high heat. I then put it into a bowl (it was lean, so no draining was required).

My step before Brody's first step was to roast the peppers. The recipe calls for a 6.5-ounce jar of roasted peppers. Since my adventures with Mexican mole sauces, I almost never purchase roasted peppers, preferring to cook them directly on the stove. In this case, I went a little overboard and roasted three large ones on the rarely-used oblong center burner. I had done this and placed the peppers in a sealed bowl for sweating while I worked the indispensable cast-iron skillet.

Roasting peppers, in progress. I let them get much
more charred than this.

At some point I heated a pot of water with a little oil and salt. I never rush a sauce, but it is good to have the water ready when it is time to cook the pasta.

While the peppers were sweating -- I added some olive oil to the pan, reduced the heat and slowly cooked one diced onion (I have no idea how its size compares to the called-for 1-1/3 cup) and two teaspoons of garlic.

Just kidding about that quantity of garlic:

My friend Joe has convinced me
never to measure garlic again.

After I scraped, seeded, and cored the peppers, I pureed them in a blender with a can of tomato paste (instead of 2 tablespoons) and a little olive oil. I often do this when substituting home-roasted peppers for those that are bottled in oil. At this point I started boiling the pasta.

Once the onions and garlic were softened, I returned the sausage to the skillet and added the puree along with a modest dousing of cayenne pepper and a small bag of frozen corn. Yes, frozen corn. Because Jane Brody said so. The sauce was to simmer for 10 minutes -- it was quite thick, so I added a little bit of Malbec. Never a bad idea.

Once the penne was al dente, I drained it and combined it in a bowl with the sauce and several finely-sliced scallions.

The result was more delicious than photogenic, which I expected. That is why I favored this space with in-progress photos, rather than the final dish. We will definitely be adding this to the repertoire!

Pasta and Sausage

We sometimes include local breakfast sausage in our weekly order from Crescent Ridge (yes, an old-school milk truck comes to our house every Monday morning). We usually use it in just that way -- as patties with waffles or other breakfast food.

When thinking about our food options last night, however, I decided to look for a way to make dinner from breakfast sausage. It was our salon date night, which usually involves supporting a local restaurant. Because we had been dining out nearly non-stop during our recent vacation in the Maritimes, though, I wanted to make a nice date-night meal at home. And because this is the canicula, I wanted stovetop cooking only -- no oven. This meant that my favorite dinner use of sausage was out of the question.

Rather than opening some cookbooks -- which would have been true to the original mission of this blog -- I did what we often do in such situations. I browsed the results of a search of "sausage" on the AllRecipes web site. I looked at a few options, and settled on Bow Ties with Sausage, Tomatoes and Cream -- one of those recipe titles that essentially is the recipe.

I digressed from the recipe only slightly. I used thin spaghetti instead of bowties or penne, either of which would have held the sauce better. I also used fresh tomatoes instead of the canned equivalent. The preparation was simple and the results -- while not photogenic -- were quite delicious!

Super Solstice Salsa (plus a bonus Old Bay recipe)

To celebrate the first day of summer I got out my handy Wicca Cookbook and found a recipe for Cucumber Salsa in the Summer Solstice section. It calls for only six ingredients: chopped cucumber, chopped jalapeño (I substituted peperoncini), chopped cilantro, fresh squeezed lemon juice, and salt and pepper. The cookbook says it is "delicious over fish, pork, beef, chicken or salad". We were already planning on preparing fresh fish for dinner, so the salsa was enjoyed on top of some haddock cooked in olive oil.

I also discovered that Baltimore's Mayor Catherine Pugh had proclaimed June 21 to be Old Bay Day. As a native Baltimorean I had no choice but to find a second recipe that called for Old Bay. We had already decided on pasta as a side dish, so I adapted a recipe I found online (by entering the ingredients pasta and Old Bay into allrecipes.com) and prepared cooked rigotoni with chopped cucumbers, red pepper flakes, chopped queso blanco, olive oil, lemon juice, and of course some Old Bay seasoning.

This all made for a simple, yet satisfying and refreshing summer meal.

James adds:

This meal paired well with a (not-too-sweet) Riesling from Westport Rivers Vineyard & Winery. We took the rest of the pasta there as part of our picnic last night for the Sunset Music series.

Spaghetti Carbonara

James and I like to read together, and listen to audio books together when we are in the car. The last time we read a memoir about food Voracious: A Hungry Reader Cooks her way through Great Books we talked about a lot of recipes we planned on trying from the book, but over a year later we have yet to prepare any. By contrast, we are still in the midst of listening to Guilia Melucci's I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti, and have already enjoyed her recipe for Spaghetti Carbonara. The recipe is simple. Ingredients include:

3 slices of cooked bacon
3 eggs (lightly beaten)
1/4 c. freshly grated pecorino, plus a little more for passing
1/4 c. freshly grated parmigiano, plus a little more for passing
Salt
Freshly ground pepper
Cooked pasta

I think we only used parmigiano cheese, but otherwise followed the recipe which calls for adding the cooked pasta to a warm bowl with the (uncooked) eggs and cheese and letting the hot pasta cook the eggs. She does realize that some may not like the idea of the undercooked eggs, and suggests that everything can be cooked in a skillet on the stovetop instead. We decided to try it creamy the way Melucci intended. The bacon, salt and pepper are added before serving.

This was easy to prepare and good to eat.

Pasta with Mint, Basil, and Fresh Mozzarella.

One thing I really like about the New York Times Cooking app is that in most cases the name of the recipe is the recipe (another thing I like is that the app doesn't close on me while I'm in the middle of preparing my meal). This simple summer meal has a few more ingredients than is indicated in the title, but to those of us with a well-stocked kitchen a call for garlic, or Parmesan cheese, means nothing more than to check our supply of staples. I am not also afraid to substitute ingredients. In this case I used walnuts instead of pine nuts.

Since we were able to make use of the mint and basil growing in our yard this tasted especially fresh.

Blue Jean Mac & Cheese

Once again, Pam has proven her prowess at finding recipes that can be made with ingredients on hand in our larder. It helps that we keep the kitchen well supplied with a variety of ingredients and very few prepared foods. It also helps that we have a lot of cook books. But mainly Pam is just very good at this.

Knowing that we had some bacon remaining from earlier dishes. Pam looked for a recipe that would make good use of it. She turned first to Comfortable in the Kitchen by Meredith Laurence, also known as the Blue Jean Chef (BJC). I think she might have a television show. The book had been a gift of my mother, and features slightly sophisticated comfort foods, such as the Comfortable Crusty Chicken and ginger salmon we blogged about last December.

On page 80, Pam found Bacon, Tomato and Green Pea Mac 'n' Cheese. The recipe begins with heating the oven to 350F, and then bringing a large pot of water to boil for the pasta. It calls for macaroni or "other short pasta" which in this case meant penne. A couple minutes before the pasta was done, I added 1-1/2 cups of frozen peas. I had never thought of doing so at this early stage, but will certainly do so in future casseroles. When strained, the pasta and peas just rested in the colander while I continued to work with the indispensable cast-iron skillet.

The recipe calls for 1 pint of cherry tomatoes, halved. At Pam's suggestion, I used a can of diced tomatoes, placing them in a sieve early in the process so that they would be well drained.

There I had been cooking bacon. The BJC called for six slices, chopped into one-inch pieces. I had missed that detail until just now, and failed to chop up the bacon. Fortunately I had gotten it crispy enough that it easily broke into pieces in the mixing bowl. I removed the bacon and then cooked a small, finely-chopped onion until it was translucent and added six tablespoons of flour and one tablespoon of mustard powder (the BJC had suggested only two teaspoons). I then gradually whisked in four cups of milk (not too cold) until a roux was formed, brought it to a gentle simmer and cooked it until thickened.

Photo: Comfortable in the Kitchen

I removed the skillet from heat and then stirred in the grated cheeses. I used a total of about three cups of sharp Vermont cheddar and parmesan, but the BJC calls for 3 cups Gruyere or Swiss, 2 cups cheddar, and one cup parmesan.

Once the cheeses were incorporated into the sauce, everything went into a big mixing bowl for thorough stirring. I then combined panko crumbs (in lieu of the homemade bread crumbs BJC suggests) with thyme and parsley (again substituting dry herbs for the fresh ones called for) as a topping. I put the penne mix in a 9x13 casserole and topped it with the crumb mix. I baked this for about a half hour.

The result: excellent comfort food and plenty of it. It will be a significant part of this afternoon's Saturday linner. The only drawback to this recipe is that it turned what is often a one-dish recipe into an every-dish-we-own recipe. This made me grateful for our dishwasher!