Mac and Cheese

I'm not really good at making mac and cheese. I have never used a recipe, and always just make a cheese sauce that starts as a roux. Often the sauce is too thick to make a nice mac and cheese. Always, there is not enough sauce for the amount of pasta I make.

Last weekend Jennifer went to sleep saying she didn't want more soup for dinner. She wanted to eat with a fork. Looking through the pantry I found enough ingredients to make mac and cheese. Well, at least the way I make it.

While I did not try anything different in the making of the sauce, I did a few things that may not be so traditional with mac and cheese. One is that I added broccoli, which is a nice nutritional addition. And everybody knows that broccoli and cheese are friends. The other is that I added hominy. This was inspired by Beecher's Santa Fe Mac and Cheese, a dish I had never actually tasted. I used Teasdale Gold hominy which I thought had a wonderful flavor. This addition of hominy was also spurred by my recent use of hominy in chili and I thought I should try to use hominy more.

I used a reduced fat habanero cheddar from Cabot. There was at least one issue with using this cheese, and perhaps two. The known issue is that the mac and cheese had a little too much of the heat that has no flame. I recommended to Jennifer to add sour cream to hers to help quell the heat. Still edible in my opinion, but I'm different than most people. The second issue comes from the fact that the cheese was reduced fat. In an effort to stretch a half pound of cheese in the sauce over a half pound of pasta and a can of hominy, I used a lot of milk in the sauce which the cheese did not melt so smoothly into. Not sure if this was my overuse of milk, or the nature of the cheese. Anyway, in typical fashion there really was not enough sauce, but a gratin makes everything more delicious and attractive.