Still More Leftovers...

Weds. Sept. 11, 2009


I still have tons of minestrone in the fridge (not to mention freezer), but there comes a point when you have to change what you're eating or you'll go crazy.

I was feeling like I hadn't been eating enough lately, or at least that minestrone doesn't last long enough in my tummy to make me feel full between meals for as long as I like. So here's the opposite end of that spectrum: home-made macaroni and cheese with grilled ham steak. If this won't make you feel full and fat (in a good way! "Soft as silk and fat as butter", like that book about the lion...), nothing will.

I usually have a hard time judging ratios in making the roux for the cheese sauce, and then again trying to figure out how much milk to add in. It was no different this time, but I managed to figure it out. In fact, this is the first time I've ever made the perfect amounts of pasta and sauce for each other; usually my pasta is either swimming or all dry. The cheese in it is equal parts extra sharp cheddar, mozzarella, and a handful or so of feta, then I salted, peppered, and paprika'd to taste.

This is also my first time making this kind of pasta. For some reason, some shapes of pasta are just right for certain dishes in my mind: scampi requires spaghetti or possibly farfalle, red sauce likes penne--with lines, of course-- and if you're making an alfredo, you need fettuccine or  fiori (tricolor, even on the latter, especially if it's with shirmp!). I got this pasta because it was originally going to go into the minestrone, but it turned out that I had 1/2 a box left of some whole-wheat penne that I figured I should just get rid of, especially because I can never seem to cook the whole-wheat stuff to my liking to go with just sauce.

This pasta was called campanelle, but also is called riccioli and gigli. The former means "little bells", Google tells me, riccioli means "curlies", basically, and "gigli" means "lillies", but I got a lot of unhelpful answers for this term first like "a bad film starring Ben Afflek and Jennifer Lopez" and  "a wire saw originally used to cut the pubis.Now used in removing the scalp in craniotomy" before I could figure that out. TERRIFYING. In any case, they look to me more like chanterelles, which are definitely among the dantiest of mushrooms, and so very ok with me.

***EDIT FRIDAY, SEPT. 11, 2009***

Mix in a little broccoli and pair it with a mug of dark chocolate cocoa (with marshmallows, of course), and I can already feel this sad, grumpy day get a little brighter :).