Comfort Food Made With Real Food
Aug. 21st, 2009
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By Dana McMahan
FoodConnect Louisville
dana.mcmahan@foodconnect.com
I grew up smack in the middle of the time that marketers of packaged, processed foods were convincing moms and grandmas across the country that it was good and necessary to feed kids food-like substances packed with artificial, well, everything. Maybe not so different from now except there was no large counter-movement for real food. So while I fortunately did have my share of food from the farm, I also grew up on the blue box of macaroni and cheese.
I didn’t leave it in early adulthood either, hopping out of bed late at night when I was first married to dump and stir and return with a bowl of lurid orange-coated pasta. And even now, fully in the grip of eat-local, eat-real-food mania, I confess to sometimes wanting an easy stovetop macaroni and cheese. In the winter my husband and I make a decadent roux-based baked three-cheese dish, bubbling over with gruyere and blue, crunchy with buttered, broiled panko, wanton with truffle oil. But that’s on long Sunday afternoons in January, not a humid August work day that I’ve been home sick.
I remembered Alton Brown whipping up a stovetop mac and cheese once, so took a look and sure enough – a blazingly easy dish that sounded like a very happy compromise between boxed fake food and fancy Sunday food.My ever-obliging (especially when it comes to dinner that doesn’t involve lentils or bulgur) husband stopped at the store for ingredients -- a pretty easy list: pasta shells, evaporated milk, sharp cheddar and butter. (We’d run nearly out making the faux gnocchi over the weekend.) We already had some eggs from the farm we buy from.
I roused myself from the couch long enough to put a pot of water on the boil, so when he came home it was barely any more work than tearing open a packet of powder and dumping into the pot would have been.
Here’s the recipe, adapted from Alton Brown (we used paprika in place of the hot sauce he calls for, and adjusted the quantities to make four main-dish servings, two for dinner and two for lunch).
This was definitely a winner in our house. I paid for it on the scale this morning, so it won’t go into the weekly rotation, but it’ll certainly take top place when I want easy, real comfort food.
Ingredients
Ingredients
- 10 ounces shell pasta
- 6 tablespoons butter
- 3 eggs
- 10 ounces evaporated milk
- 1 tsp paprika
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt
- Fresh black pepper
- 1 teaspoon dry mustard
- 14 ounces sharp cheddar, freshly shredded
While bringing water to a boil whisk together the eggs, milk, paprika, salt, pepper, and mustard.
In a large pot of boiling, salted water cook the pasta to al dente and drain. Add to a sizzling hot iron skillet with melted butter. Toss to coat.
Slowly stir the milk/eggs and the cheese into the pasta. Over low heat continue to stir for 3 minutes or until creamy.
Dana has eaten her way from Inverness to Istanbul, and from Monaco to Morocco. A food and travel writer, she lives to explores the world and tell stories of foods discovered and meals devoured in far-flung lands. She once hand-carried a tagine across three continents in order to recreate a Moroccan feast, her backpack smells of spices, and she has been known to smuggle butter home from Paris. Her most recent adventure was learning all about the duck at Camp Confitt in Gascony, France. When at home in Louisville she dishes on restaurant news for her column in the Courier Journal.
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