Easy Mac n’ Cheese, LoLo Style

Not to be confused with Myrnie’s recipe for Easy Macaroni and Cheese.

This? Is my go-to macaroni and cheese recipe. I love it because it uses one pot, one colander, mug, whisk and a wooden spoon. Also? The sauce isn’t thickened with flour. Flour’s fine, but I always get the proportions wrong, and it has to cook for a good five minutes before you know if you got it right or not. And then it’s hard to fix.

This recipe is thickened with cornstarch, or tapioca starch. Hello, instant gratification! (Oh, and the kidlets all love it.

 

Easy Mac n’ Cheese, LoLo Style

Ingredients:

Salted water

1 pound pasta (macaroni, rigatoni, Seattle Space Needle…whatever)

Cornstarch, or tapioca flour

Milk

Grated Cheddar cheese.

 

Tools:

Soup pot

Wooden spoon

Whisk

Mug

Colander

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil and cook one pound of pasta.  While the pasta is cooking. put a colander and a mug in the sink. When it’s cooked just right, head over to the sink. First pour the water over the mug to fill it, and then drain the rest of the pasta into the colander. Let it just chill out in the sink for a second.

 

Swing by the cupboard and grab the cornstarch (or tapioca starch). Stop by the refrigerator and grab the milk and a bag of shredded cheddar cheese.

Now you’re back at the stove, whisk in hand. Make sure your milk, cheese, starch and that mug of water from the sink are handy. Pour in enough milk to cover the bottom of the pot by about 1/2”. Then put in two heaping spoonfuls of your cornstarch. Turn the heat to medium, and whisk it up. It will be a little gloppy at first, but keep whisking until it’s smooth. When it’s smooth, start throwing in handfuls of cheese. You might want to switch back to the wooden spoon at this point. It takes quite a bit of cheese to make a tasty pasta…four of five handfuls. If it gets too thick, thin it down with the pasta water, or a little more milk.

Finally, dump your pasta back into the pot and stir to coat. Kill the heat, and VOILA! Easy, sheeny, cheesy yummy macaroni and cheese.

Krab Toast

I had a few sticks of mock crab left over from a recent sushi night, and came up with these rich toasts. They were great with a bowl of tomato soup. I had 2 sticks of mock crab, and it made three small toasts- you can modify this however you wish. Of course, this crab salad is also great in a pasta salad, or as part of a sushi roll! For pasta salad you could add celery and whatever else looked good that day.

Krab Toast
2 sticks mock crab, finely minced
about 2 Tbsp mayonnaise
about 1 Tbsp finely minced onion

grated cheese


Stir together first three ingredients and spread on pieces of bread (or toast if you'd like these firmer when you finish), and top with grated cheese. We used mozzarella and a bit of parmesan. Broil until cheese is melted and bubbly.

Garden Fresh Tomato Soup

The original recipe for this can be found here. I mostly followed the recipe, but upped the onion, omitteed cloves, changed up the cooking method, and never bothered to measure my tomatoes.

Garden Fresh Tomato Soup
Based on a Recipe from AllRecipes.com

About 4 cups chopped fresh tomatoes (I used a mixture of yellow plum and roma)
1/4 of a small yellow onion, sliced
2 Tbsp butter
2 Tbsp flour
2 cups chicken broth
salt to taste
sugar to taste (up to 2 tsp)

In a medium pot cook tomatoes and onions on medium high heat to slightly wilt and roast. Stir in butter and flour to form a roux- let cook and bubble until thickened. Stir in 2 cups chicken broth, vigorously, scraping up bits from the bottom of the pan. Let simmer 20 minutes, and puree with a stick blender.

Pour soup through a wire mesh strainer into serving bowl (to strain out any large chunks of tomato skin) and season to taste with salt and suger. I didn't use any extra salt, as my broth was from bullion powder and already quite salty.

Oatmeal Lemon Cranberry Muffins

Phew, now THERE is an unwieldy title. These muffins are based on the muffin recipe in Better Homes and Gardens (BHG) anniversary edition cookbook. Believe me when I say it is almost always my first stop for a "base" recipe.

I doubled the recipe and used the "oatmeal muffins" option (reduce the flour and add oatmeal) and then riffed from there. Here's my final recipe, it made 20 large muffins (about a 1/4 cup of batter each.) The nice thing about using these silicone muffin liners is that I could use them, free standing, on a baking sheet and didn't need to worry about filling empty spots with water. The water is one of my pet peeves- it wicks onto the oven mitts and burns me, sloshes, makes so much steam my smoke alarm goes off when I open the oven, and I can't just dump all the muffins onto a cooling rack. These are Le Creuset brand, I highly recommend!

The muffins came out nice and light, without the bitter baking soda flavor I often find in muffins. The lemon wasn't overpowering or bitter, which is nice too and hard to do with oils I've found. You could probably substitute a bit of lemon juice and rind for the same effect, and reduce the milk accordingly. One thing I'm not sure of is the effect of the lemon oil on the milk- I mix lemon juice and milk for a buttermilk substitute, and I didn't notice any thickening of the milk mixture before I stirred it in, but the "buttermilk effect" might account for why these turned out so light and airy.

Oatmeal Lemon Cranberry Muffins
Based on a recipe from BHG

a scant 2 2/3 cup AP flour
1 1/2 cups rolled oats
2/3 cup white sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 heaping teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
a few handfuls of dried cranberries

1 1/2 cups milk
1/2 cup cooking oil
2 eggs, beaten
a few drops of pure lemon oil (just a tiny dribble)
1 teaspoon vanilla

Mix dry ingredient and wet ingredients separately, then just barely stir together. Spoon into muffin tins or liners and bake 18-20 minutes at 400 degrees until they test done in the centers. Best served warm.

Notes: cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cranberries, lemon oil, and vanilla were not included in the original recipe.

LoLo Banana Bundt Cake

Adapted from Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking, From My Home to Yours” (Classic Banana Bundt Cake)


Ingredients:
3 cups AP flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup olive oil
2 cups sugar
2 tsp. pure vanilla extract
2 large eggs
About 1 1/2 cups mashed bananas (about four medium bananas), very ripe
1 cup plain yogurt

Preheat your oven to 350, with a rack in the middle. Prepare your Bundt pan by greasing it well. (I used cooking spray.)
In a medium bowl, whisk or sift together flour, baking soda and salt.
In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat together the olive oil and sugar until well-combined and smooth-ish. Add the vanilla and then the eggs, one at a time, beating for about one minute after each egg goes in to make sure it is well incorporated. Turn the mixer down to low, and add in your bananas. Finally (still on low), mix in half the flour mixture, then all of the yogurt, and then the rest of the flour mixture.  Remove all of the batter to your Bundt pan and smooth out the top.
Bake for 65-75 minutes, or until a toothpick in the deepest part of the cake comes out clean. (Check it at 30 minutes – if it’s getting too brown for your liking, cover it loosely with tin foil for the rest of the baking time.) Cool the cake pan on a rack for 10 minutes, and then take the cake out of the pan and let it finish cooling on the rack.
This is even better the next day!

Plum Mustard Dipping Sauce

I love to dip ham and cheese turnovers in this or sweet potato fries.  It's fantastic on ham sandwiches as well!  You can use any jam or mustard, but my favorite combo is plum jam from our italian prune tree in the backyard and honey mustard.  The first person that can give me a honey mustard recipe that tastes like French's honey mustard wins my gratitude!  It would probably be phenomenal with a good stone-ground, course mustard.

Fruit and Mustard Dipping Sauce
Jam
Mustard

Stir to combine.  Yes, that's it!  I normally just mix it on my plate because NO ONE else in my family will eat mustard, and I don't eat meat often enough to make up a larger batch.  If anyone tries to store it in the fridge, let us know how that works?  I imagine it would be just fine.

Apricot Frozen Yogurt

Nectarine Frozen Yogurt
Ingredients
2 cups vanilla yogurt
8 apricots
Sugar to taste

Rinse, halve and pit apricots, and blend with yogurt and sugar in a bowl using a hand blender. Skins will either be blended up or will wrap around the blade of the immersion blender- you can clean them out when you're done. Taste for sweetness and add sugar as needed.

Pour into ice cube trays and freeze until solid. Working with half the batch at a time, "pulse" cubes in a food processor 20-30 times until finely blended and it's gathered into one or two "football shaped" balls. Serve it up! It will be a little on the soft side- you can refreeze if you like to "ripen." Because of the low fat content, this has a grainy/flaky consistency- if it's made with a proper ice cream custard base, it's quite creamy and perfect! (HT to Kenji Alt-Lopez for this technique)