Concerns: low mac:cheese ratio, thinness/soupiness of the cheese sauce after stove-top cooking, sharpness/bitterness of cheese flavors, lack of density and stringiness in final product.

Successes: elimination of the roux/flour flavor, overwhelmingly cheesy flavor, excellent topping, leftover potential, overwhelmingly positive feedback from TSB and my roommate.

Mistakes: I was so irritated by the sauce to pasta ratio as I was incorporating the noodles that I scooped two or three full cups of sauce out of the mix and threw it in the fridge (which reminds me that I still need to dispose of it). In retrospect, I should have left it in, as it seems that it would have been a non-issue once baked.

Strategy: Next time, I will maintain the amount of cream but reduce the milk to a pint, maybe fatten it up from 2% to whole milk, raise the roux by a tablespoon each of flour and butter (leaving 1 tablespoon from the stick left to butter the dish), and spend more time getting the initial béchamel to thicken before adding the cheese. I’m going to return to Cabot extra-sharp cheddar and monterey jack as well, even if I do have to have my cheese smuggled in from Vermont. I might play with the cheese blend some other time, and in the future, I may attempt the inclusion of reserved pasta cooking water, once I figure out why it is so prevalent in other recipes.

Inspired by a coworker’s campaign to cut down on paper waste in the office, I did some research to find the best-bang-for-the-buck travel mug and on a tip from Cook’s Illustrated, I ended up buying the OXO LiquiSeal in gray plastic at Cole Hardware for ten bucks. I’ve been using paper since the travel mug that came with my public radio donation stopped keeping the liquid on the inside and the lid seemed to become magnetically repulsed by the base.

This thing works like a dream. The cap screws on, so it won’t fall off when I thoughtlessly carry it by the lid; there is an easy push-button seal so that I can carry it upside down or in my pocket if I want; the lip is designed in a way that I don’t spill down the sides of my face when I tip it back too far; and coffee doesn’t pool on the lid, so when I push the button, all of the coffee is already inside the mug. Wow, I should not be admitting to the entire Internet what an absent-minded slob I am. Seems fairly well insulated and did not taint the flavor of my house blend. I might buy another to use as a cocktail shaker. My only complaint is for the lack of a handle.

The Sexy Blonde called me last night to see if I would like her to bring back a bottle of Spanish wine from Barcelona. As I pondered my options, it occurred to me that she is in one of the few countries where Absinthe is not banned, and so I asked if she would be comfortable sneaking a bottle back across the border for me. She said she thought she could indulge me.

Not only did she buy me a bottle, but followed up to say that she had stumbled across black absinthe in some cute little shop, which she had never seen before and wondered if I would like some. I haven’t encountered it either, and after a few minutes of research, I have not been able to dig up a whole lot of info other than it most likely comes from France, where absinthe may be produced for export, but not sold domestically, and it probably doesn’t have a strong anise flavor, if any. As to any significant differences between the green fairy and the black, I have been able to dig up nothing.

I’ve been working on my mac & cheese recipe for a while. Last week’s manifestation, as prepared for the pleasure of The Sexy Blonde was one of my finest, although in a misguided attempt to appeal to her sophisticated tastes, I decided to reinforce the sharp cheddar with gruyere, which she seemed to like, but I thought was too much sharp on top of sharp and the gruyere was hard to incorporate into the sauce. There were a few other issues with the sauce that I need to hammer out, but it came out well and the leftovers seem to have improved with age.

My fascination started with my dear mother’s gorgeous baked macaroni and cheese, a straightforward and divine dish made with sharp Cabot cheddar that we anticipated each holiday season and fought ruthlessly over the crispy corner sections. I love this family recipe for its simplicity and high cheese and butter content as a side to accompany a robust holiday meal, but when I want mac to be the centerpiece, I tend to go for something stickier and more complex.

Unfortunately, I have overindulged my desire for complexity and the mac and cheese fascination has taken on a life of it’s own. It’s like the Michael Mina Mac, or “macaroni and cheese served three ways.” This isn’t just three variations, but an evolutionary development in three courses that I should never serve all together.

I’m trying to devise a single recipe that will function first as a stove-top mac right out of the pot, equivalent to Kraft, but actually made with cheese; thinner and more fluid, hot on the side of your plate. From there, with minimal alteration to the compound, I’d like to be able to pour it into a baking dish, add a crispy cheese and breadcrumb topping and bake it to a more dense and sticky consistency. Third, I would be able to leave the baked mac in the fridge overnight to solidify, slice it up, bread it and deep fry it like a mozzarella stick.

I would also like to see the flavors evolve as the dish becomes more complicated. It starts out seasoned simply with salt and pepper, red pepper, nutmeg and mustard, served like you would the boxed variety. I am thinking of making the baked dish more savory with bacon or prosciutto and scallions or shallots, and spicy peppers would be added to a portion of the leftovers and then chilled, cut into chicken nugget (or fish stick) size pieces to be breaded and deep fried. I could even spoon dollops of warm mac and cheese into emptied jalapeños, and fry them up as poppers. Fried mac could be served with dipping sauces like marinara, ranch or an avacado & sour cream concoction. All that I have left to discover is a 4th incarnation. Could I come up with a macaroni and cheese dessert? Maybe something with pears. It seems kind of evil, but it could work.

I’ve been playing with my recipe for a while, inspecting a combination of recipes including those online from Charlie Palmer, Giada De Laurentiis, Martha Stewart, Alton Brown, Bon Appétit, Emeril, The Icon Grill, Paula Deen, and Cooks Illustrated, but my favorite recipe comes from the New York Times, but is not the one that shows up online so often, which ran with this article. In fact, I have not been able to find it online at all, but this one from Gourmet is pretty close, and I have photocopied the page from my Sunday Times Magazine several times when friends ask me for a reliable, remarkable recipe, but it still has yet to meet my three-in-one requirement…and you thought I was taking it too seriously before the Holy Trinity allusion.

I have gathered the ingredients and I am going to make the test batches of Gingered Duck Cookies in the next few days. The Sexy Blonde is in Barcelona on business, so I have fewer distractions to deal with (sadly). On the upside, she’s offered to smuggle back a bottle of absinthe for me, and just when my reserve is dwindling dangerously low.

The recipe should yield about 4 cups of dough, and I’m substituting Vermont maple syrup for molasses in a quarter of the batch (mix the rest of the ingredients, quarter the dough, add 1 tablespoon of maple to one quarter and 3 tablespoons of molasses to the rest) and then running tests of unaltered molasses against unaltered maple on cookie sheets and in muffin cups. Ginger and maple is a personal favorite combination and there was more than enough burned sugar flavor in the original recipe.

I’ll set aside the rest of the maple, unless it is an unfettered failure, and look to alter the molasses with combinations of lemon zest, almonds and carrots. I’m going to dig through some ginger bread and carrot cake recipes to see if there are other ingredients I may want to play with.

My gratitude for The Sexy Blonde and her tasting tour assistance in wine country last week prompted me to prepare a hearty meal of comfort food for two last night, and I was so appreciative that I found the time to make everything from scratch.

Crostini with olive tapenade and goat cheese
Salad of butter lettuce, golden beets, walnuts and goat cheese with a shallot vinaigrette
Baked macaroni and cheese (sharp cheddar and gruyere with crispy topping)
Chicken schnitzel (with carbombbq sauce on the side)
Swedish ginger cookie cups with vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce
A bottle of Carignane that we picked up around Healdsburg

She seemed happy, but complained that I was going to make her fat, but she is the last person to need to worry about that. We joked about what a great story it would make for a chef to seduce his women with his cooking, fatten them up and then cast them aside and move on to the next conquest, but then what will the chef get as his just des(s)erts?

In preparation for the Gingered Duck Cookies, I made a few dozen traditional Swedish ginger and bacon fat cookies to help me consider my adaptation scheme. I think I can just swap out the fats, but I am going to do a little melt test and some Internet research before I make the first batch.

Based on flavor, I was thinking that they would make a killer ice cream sandwich with vanilla or lemon gelato between, but they are sort of hard, so I don’t think the structure of the cookie would be conducive to a sandwich. To bring them from delicious to amazing, I am considering the addition of lemon zest and/or almonds to enhance the flavor. I would really love to find a way to get them to fluff up more too, rather than spreading and crisping so much, so I will experiment with not pressing them, adding more baking soda, etc. but the science of baking is something I do not understand. To prove it, the following paragraph illustrates how I tried to use physics to solve a chemistry problem.

While trying to counteract the cookie’s tendency to flatten, I discovered a fun trick that circumvents the ice cream sandwich issue. I figured that if the cookies would have no room to spread out, then they might take the path of least resistance and rise, so I dropped a dozen dough balls into a cupcake pan. I should have figured that you can’t use force to coax dough into rising, since really it’s a chemical reaction issue. Rather than rise, they spread up the sides of the cups, resulting in flat-bottomed, bowl-shaped cookies, which would perfectly cradle a scoop of ice cream. Next time I am going to use a bigger ball of dough in the cup and see if can make a larger cookie cup. I love the happy accidents, and the cupcake pan cookies actually are a little fluffier and softer than the cookie sheet variety. Brute force and ignorance triumph again!