Mac and Cheese with Green Beans

Today I decided to make a homestyle favorite, some macaroni and cheese.  This was and still is a dish that I find to be best made by my mother.  Every time I have homemade mac and cheese it reminds me of home, and since I've been feeling a little homesick lately, I decided this would be the perfect meal to make.  Now I have no intention of simply replicating my moms recipe, so I took my own (read: a recipe I found online slightly altered) approach to it.

Mac and Cheese


1 1/2 cup of elbow macaroni
3/4 cup of grated Gruyere cheese
1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup flour
Pinch of thyme, pepper, salt, nutmeg
2 cups of milk
1/2 cup of italian breadcrumbs (were supposed to be Panko breadcrumbs, but I don't know where I put them... sketchy.  I think I moved these to the new apartment.)

I heated the butter until it was nice and bubbling, then stirred in the flour to make a nice roux.  Added in the seasoning now, as the website I stole the recipe from suggested that I do this.  Something about some spices being oil soluble and thus releasing better flavour if added before I added the milk.  Sounds legit to me.  Next up, mixing in the milk, slowly at first... then I got lazy and just poured the rest in.... haha my kind of cooking.  I left this heat over medium heat for about 5 minutes.

I then removed the sauce from heat and added in the cheese.  At this point, the sauce is hot enough to melt the cheese on its own, so no need for the heat.  I mentioned above it was 3/4 cups of cheese.... this was probably a lie.  I tend to overdo it on the cheese.  I did try to leave about 1/4 cup of cheese left over for the crust.  While on this was going on, I have the macaroni cooking.  I shouldn't really need to detail out the instructions for this.... just boiling water with a little salt.

In a pan, I put in the cooked noodles, and mixed in the cheese sauce.  For the size of pan, I actually didn't need all of the sauce.  Despite my desire to just drown the noodles in the delicious cheese sauce, probably a good choice not to from both a health and presentation point of view.  For the crust, I sprinkled the rest of the cheese, followed by the breadcrumbs over top.  I then tossed in the oven at about 400F for maybe 20 minutes to brown the top.

Green Beans


Handful of green beans
1 1/2 tbs of peanut oil
1 tbs of sesame oil
2 tbs sesame seeds
Pinch of salt/pepper

As healthy side for the mac and cheese, in addition to adding some colour, I chose to make sesame seed crusted green beans.  A simple recipe from a veggie cookbook.  Neat story, it actually calls for asparagus, which would actually be like 4 times better, but unfortunately the asparagus at the grocery looked truly awful, so I switched it up to green beans.

The instructions as I alluded to are very simple.  Simply coat the beans in the oil in a bowl, mix in the sesame seeds and salt/pepper and mix until the beans are coated.  Then cook the beans at 400F for like 8-10 minutes.

Tomato Rose


You may noticed the simple tomato rose I made in order to spice up the plate a little bit and make the dish a little more colourful.  I added this in after the fact, as the plate just seemed sad with only the pasta and beans.  This are pretty simple enough to make, simply peel a tomato as you would an apple, but be sure to not break the skin (ie. peel in only one piece).  After it's peeled, simply roll the skin to make it look like a rose.  Easy to do, and make almost any meal look kind profesh. (trust me, it's a word).