Ravenous Recipe #1:

I have financial economy in eating worked out to a fine art, and know the self-service lunch rooms where I can get the best bargains. I never spend more than $3.00 per week on food, and often not even nearly that.”
—H.P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 7 November 1932 


Oh the irony, the rich delicious irony that the man who inspired the name of the blog you read at this very moment had no money to spend on food. Well Mr. Lovecraft, this one's for you and all the food you should have been eating:"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!!!"

Let me be honest for just a second, is that ok? Thank you. I was extremely nervous to get rolling on this cooking challenge. I spent the week pouring over several cookbooks that I picked up at the library and realized: whoo doggy! These recipes are way more complicated than I thought, so after much thought and nervous sweating, I decided on this recipe.

Killer mac and cheese with bacon, "Cook Like A Rock Star" by Anne Burrell

Honest moment #2: I have never cooked anything this complicated. Pardon me while I go in the corner and palm my face. Ok, here we go self, you can do it...

Ingredients: 
Extra virgin olive oil
 6 slices of bacon, cut into half inch strips (or ya know, just cut up, do what thou wilt)
3 tablespoons of unsalted butter
 1 onion, cut into a 1/4 inch dice (more on that later)
kosher salt
1/2 cup flour
1 quart whole milk
1 pound shells or other short pasta
2 cups freshly grated cheddar cheese
2 ups freshly grated Fontina cheese
1 cup freshly grated Parmigiano 
1/4 cup Dijon mustard
Tabasco or other hot sauce to taste

Those are the ingredients: Here is what went down when I made it:

I drizzled some of the olive oil into my large saucepan, turned the burner to medium heat and tossed in all my sliced bacon and cooked it for right around six minutes. I discovered that since I have an old school/magical wizard stove, that the minimum cook times were more than enough. If you have a new school/Muggle stove you may want to let it run for closer to eight minutes, checking it along the way. I also realized at the end of the process that my pan could have been a little bit bigger, maybe something more like a dutch oven. Just a heads up.

To quote a certain Hobbit, "Tomatoes, sausages, nice crispy bacon"

Cooking the bacon this way made what was, I kid you not, the most perfectly crunchy yet perfectly soft piece(s) of bacon I have ever put in my mouth. After the bacon was finished cooking I set it aside but made sure I saved the fat (the recipe was very explicit about this. "Do not discard the bacon fat!" the page shouted at me, but in a joking, jovial sort of way.)
Next I added the butter and onion into the bacon fat, seasoned it with salt (i.e. totally guessed and tossed some salt into the pan. Good enough I say!) I cooked the onions down in the butter and bacon fat (drool*) until they were "soft and aromatic." This took around eight (to ten) minutes. 

Notice the expert dice on the onion...oh wait...

About those pesky "aromatic" onions that I mentioned earlier. I know, generally, what it means to dice something. However, I have not the foggiest notion what a 1/4 inch dice looks like, aside from, I imagine, really small. So, I made sure that (most) of the onions were more or less squares and pretty much called it good.

After the eight minutes passed I added the flour and cooked it for about five min. The recipe said "until the mixture looks like wet sand." I don't know about you but I have a hard time envisioning what that looks like in relation to food so I just cooked it for the suggested amount of time and moved on. 

Wet sand? The jury is still out. Looks like a damn tasty mocha though.

After the five minutes I whisked in the milk, "seasoned" with some more salt and brought it to a boil. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself at this point since I had managed to: 

1. Not set off the smoke alarm
2. Make something that at the current stage, still looked like food
3. Figure out the best way to cook bacon, which I had to refrain from rubbing all over my body every time I looked over at it sitting on the counter.

After eight (to ten, I'm sensing a pattern here) minutes the mixture was about the consistency of heavy cream (or what I assume is heavy cream, again there was some government agency level guesswork happening.)

That's some serious witches brew right there

About the time I started to cook the bacon grease, butter, flour etc. concoction, I started boiling some salted water for the pasta. The recipe said to cook the pasta for one minute less than the package called for and by doing so I would wind up with al dente pasta. 

Blindly following the instructions was not in my favor this time and the pasta wound up being slightly undercooked. It wasn't way undercooked, but that extra minute or two would have been the difference between perfect and just a bit too chewy. I used penne pasta which may have made a difference in the cook time, but I'm still going to go ahead and say leave the pasta for that extra minute.

After the sauce stuff was heavy cream-ish I added all the cheeses. I used previously grated Parmesan because it was cheaper and I would be willing to bet you money it tastes equally delightful either way. Next  I added the mustard, which I confess was not Dijon like the recipe called for.

I love Dijon mustard in all it's spicy, sultry, nose burning glory. My lovely wife on the other hand (who I adore, but sometimes her tastes are a smidge incorrect) has described it as tasting like "paint thinner," "nail polish remover," and my personal favorite: "feet." 

If you guessed that I didn't put in the Dijon, guess what, you would be right! Sorry, there are no prizes, I'm poor. What can I say? I did, however, add some yellow mustard from the Portland Ketchup Company. No, they don't pay me to plug them, I wish, they just make some damn tasty mustard. They also make ketchup, just to confirm you suspicions. Lastly (ish) I added the cooked bacon and the pasta. At this point it was ready to serve but I decided to pop it in the oven for a few min to try to crisp up the top just a little. Sadly, my stomach got the better of me and it lasted for about four minutes in the oven. No crispy top. However, this was some delightful mac and cheese. Just look at it!

Yeah, yeah, yeah I didn't take a picture of it at the end, so sue me, I was hungry. 

If you do make this stuff, a warning: It's super rich, as in 1%er rich (Bill Gates not biker gangs.) Small portions are key as are a lot of friends, unless you want leftovers for a week. If you want to hoard it all to yourself, I'm not stopping you, but those friends you didn't invite might not talk to you until it's all gone. The choice is yours.

Until next time Comrades,
Hails!
Alex