Let me note right up front that someone told me the lime pound cake recipe from the other week was missing something — specifically the amount of lime juice to use for the optional glaze.
Before I witter on about that, I’ll put it here: it’s ⅓ cup of lime juice, along with ¾ cup sugar, heated together on the stove until the sugar dissolves.
The reader who clued me in noted that she used a ½ cup and it came out OK, so if you had to wing it, I hope you got similarly good results. Again, I got it from swapping lemon juice out for lime juice in the glaze part of King Arthur Flour’s Lemon Bliss Cake, which is worth looking up itself.
When I checked, it appeared the info got lost somewhere between me turning it in and the printing press. I am very sorry to have my readers deprived of this knowledge, but secretly kind of relieved that it wasn’t my fault.
Does anyone else do this? I have had non-life-threatening-but-bad things happen around me that I was technically involved in, and once it was clear I was neither responsible nor at fault, I felt an odd sense of joy. It’s proof positive that everything that goes wrong isn’t my fault, which is a very convoluted way of saying I have a lot of free-floating anxiety and guilt.
Possibly this is why I like to keep things vague sometimes. Of course in my reporter position, I’m all about facts — nobody picks up a paper to read a headline like “Things Happen; Details Unimportant” — but in matters of opinion about lesser topics, I lean towards mystery and possibility.
In particular, I feel this way about ghosts and cryptids. Is it terribly likely that the spirit of a Victorian lady in a fancy dress is sobbing on my stairwell at 4 a.m.? I think the house I’m living in dates from maybe the 1920s, and wasn’t the site of anything notable beforehand, certainly not a mansion.
I mean, in all reality, it’s probably the cats being weird. Three small creatures who like to chase feathered toys up and down the stairs outside my door shouldn’t sound like a series of spry young sasquatches auditioning for the WWE, and yet they do, practically every night. I’m used to it, enough so that what bothers me isn’t the fact of it, but that I might be wrong about what I’m hearing.
What if some nights it’s actually a ghost? Can I prove it? Do I want to poke my head out the door just to see? If it is a ghost, or Bigfoot, then what am I going to do? Invite it into my space to watch Netflix while I go back to sleep? Which is a very silly question, because probably whatever it is won’t know how to use it and I’ll be up until dawn explaining the remote.
My feelings about macaroni and cheese are similar. PROBABLY there’s a perfect one out there? It stands to reason that there MUST be? And yet I can’t seem to find it.
As you have different shades of craving for burgers — the thin, charbroiled drive-thru kind; the greasy, griddled drive-thru kind; the thick, sit-down restaurant kind; the extra-carcinogenic backyard cookout kind — you have different shades of craving for macaroni and cheese.
Sometimes it’s the boxed one with the powdered mix. Sometimes it’s the boxed one with the pouch of plasticky-melty orange goop. Sometimes it’s the fast-food kind in one of its sub-variants depending on which restaurant you hit. Sometimes it’s the grocery-store hot bar kind. Sometimes it’s the gas-station kind next to the fried chicken. Sometimes it’s your grandma’s from scratch, etc. And it’s hard to explain to anyone else without sounding either entitled or insane how disappointing it is to want one kind and get another.
But last weekend I was at a going-away party in Grayson County for some friends who are off to new adventures and stumbled onto the BEST macaroni and cheese of my LIFE. I am not exaggerating even a little. I tracked down which person was responsible and asked for the recipe, which I got a very little while later. I don’t know its origin, but it is superb. It’s so good, in fact, that I have no notes.
Well, OK, one: the recipe is called “Mac ‘n’ Four,” but the “mac,” aka macaroni, isn’t even in this; it calls for penne, a different type of pasta. I find this more amusing than anything else; I don’t ask that a recipe be accurate in particulars like that as long as it’s delicious, and this one certainly is.
At any rate, it’s heavy enough to help you take a little postprandial nap, but filling enough to give you the energy to stay up all night showing a cryptid how to use a remote. You should; it’s probably tired from all those stairway gymnastics.
Mac ‘n’ Four Cheese
(origin unknown; shared by a fellow party guest)
- 2 cups penne pasta, uncooked
- Half a stick of butter
- ¼ cup of flour
- ½ teaspoon seasoned salt
- ¼ teaspoon white pepper
- 2 cups milk
- 1 cup shredded sharp cheddar
- 1 cup shredded Gruyère
- 3 ounces cream cheese, cubed
- 2 tablespoons Parmesan
- ½ teaspoon dry parsley flakes or ½ tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
Preheat oven to 350˚F. Cook pasta according to package directions. Drain.
While pasta is cooking, melt butter in a 3-quart saucepan over low heat. Stir in flour, seasoned salt and white pepper. Stir continuously until the mixture is smooth and bubbly. Remove from heat.
Stir milk into seasoned butter mixture, and place the pot back over low heat. Stir constantly. Bring to a boil while you stir and boil for 1 minute. Remove from the heat. Using a whisk, stir in the cheddar, Gruyère and cream cheese into the flour mixture. Stir until melted and smooth.
Begin adding the cooked and drained pasta into the cheese sauce, stirring gently. Spoon the pasta and cheese sauce mixture into a greased 8”x 8” baking dish. Sprinkle with the Parmesan and parsley. Bake mac and cheese uncovered for 25-25 minutes or until bubbly.