Leftover Adventures, Issue No. 1

You will need to have leftover:

Ham
Swiss cheese
Cheddar cheese
Heavy cream
Half and half

You will also need:

Onions
Nutmeg
Chohula chili garlic hot sauce (seriously)
Noodles of some sort
Butter
Salt and pepper
Chicken stock
Flour



So.... you've got lots of stuff leftover in your fridge from other recipes and who knows when or how you'll get to use them next? I do I do! But forget about measurements here, we're going to wing it.

1. Chop a medium spanish onion and saute in... a lot of butter. A lot of butter is important. At first I just used a little butter, and then it all went away into the onions! I needed more butter. So will you.

2. The reason you need more butter is because you're making a roux. Or something damn close. Take a few spoonfuls of flour and sprinkle them into your onionsandbutter. See? The butter soaks up all the flour and you get a nice little paste-wad/ball of onions.

3. Here's where I effed up for the first time. But feel free to make the same mistakes because it all worked out in the end. I added roughly 2/5 of one of those tiny containers of heavy cream, and began to thin out the rouxball over medium heat. It was still incredibly thick. So I added the same amount of half-and-half. It became thinner glue, but glue nonetheless, and there was no room for cheese. So...

4. I had a small carton of chicken stock. I added this. This thinned it out way too much. I fretted. I sprinkled some nutmeg and hot sauce in there to console myself. Then I began stirring in cubed ham, swiss and cheddar cheese. The cheese slowly melted, but the sauce was still more like soup.

5. So I added 7/8 of a box of dried pasta straight into the pan. And stirred, and stirred, and stirred. I kept it on low heat, with a lid on. And prayed that it wouldn't take 5 hours to cook the noodles. But it didn't, and it was great!

This isn't your grandmother's macaroni and cheese, but only because she's on a low-fat, kosher diet.