Sunday dinner: sausages, mac, cheese

On Saturday, I went out to dinner. [Trumpets peal, victory march.] I got all dressed up in a skirt and boots that have not seen the light of day for several years because there's no way I can run after children in them - and cleavage and mascara and stuff, and I went out to dinner with my lesbian lovers. I mean, two friends. And left my poor husband at home with rice and meatballs from the freezer and two lovely children to put to bed. He managed admirably and when I rolled in at the ungodly hour of, um, 9pm (it was an early dinner) both children were asleep. [Clouds part, angels sing.]

On Sunday, I thought we were having pizza, because I had definitely seen B making pizza dough the day before. Belatedly, I realised that he had put it the freezer, not the fridge, so at 5.30 I was faced with an ever-enhungrierening family (it is so a word) and no plans. Fear not! Luckily, I had sent them swimming that afternoon while I took myself on an important mission to coughbuybootscough and had stopped by the organic food market on the way home, because they have the round crackers that the kids love because they taste like Ritz and I prefer because they don't have HFCS.

I've been increasingly ... dissatisfied, no, that's not it; disillusioned, hmm; icked out, let's say... by the meat department in my supermarket lately. When I first moved to the US the sheer volume of deep-red, styrofoam-trayed parts of dead animal in that corner of any supermarket overwhelmed me; now I'm used to it, but the more I try to avoid reading all those articles about mass-production of meat, the more I know that they're out there with horrible information in them just waiting to make an ethical consumer out of me. So while every now and then I just say "Feck it" and buy a package of minced beef or their so-called Organic chicken tenders, I'm also willing to spend a bit more less often and get meat I can feel good about. So I bought some happy sausages, because Mabel loves sausages and whenever I feel she's probably lacking some protein, I know she'll eat them.

I accidentally bought the pre-cooked type, because they looked just as anemic and undone as the regular sort, and I failed to adequately read the packet. In Ireland, the only sort of pre-cooked sausages we have are salami and its relations, so I'm still confused by the concept of pre-cooked sausages here, and tend to avoid them. Still, I decided to cook them in the oven just as I would the other sort, only for a shorter time, and they tasted pretty good. They went with some hastily conceived mac-n-cheese with that broccoli I didn't put in the carbonara I didn't make on Friday (are you still following this? Oh good), and thanks to my mistake it was all ready in 20 minutes.

So, without further ado, I will tell you how to make a cheese sauce. Mac 'n' cheese is such a staple of American childhoods that apparently it has to come out of a box, and many people - not you, obviously; all the other people - seem to be terrified of making their own sauce. It's easy, it takes five minutes, and you can use nice cheese. So do it.

Take about a tablespoon of butter and melt it in a saucepan. Stir a heaped tablespoon of plain flour into the liquid butter, season with salt and pepper, and let it cook, stirring all the time, for a minute or so. It will puff up and look weird.

That is not a scoop of vanilla icecream; it's the flour. I promise.

It's not weird; it's good. This is the gluten molecules popping, if I remember correctly, and this is what will thicken your sauce. Then put some milk in a jug, because it's easier to pour out of than from a gallon container - you'll need about, oh, I dunno, two cups, maybe. Then, still stirring with your favourite wooden spoon, start adding the milk to the pan, very gingerly, the merest splash at a time to start with. You'll think that it will never incorporate into your flour blobs, but it will.

Argh! Lumpy blobs of puff!

At some point, the whole thing will magically stop being puffy flour blobs and turn into a sauce. Now, keep adding as much milk as you want for the consistency you're looking for, remembering that the cheese will thicken it some more at the end.

Stir, stir as if your life depended on it.

This is where it's just starting to come together. See? You didn't think that was going to work, did you? Oh ye of little faith. Then you just add the cheese. I recently decided that life's too short to save money by buying crappy cheese, so I had to hand a block of Cabot Sharp Cheddar. My favourite is Kerrygold Dubliner, which was my basic go-to cheese in Ireland but sometimes I balk at the price here, so today we had the Cabot.

Cheese enters sauce. Sauce becomes delicious. My one other addition was a little blob of Dijon mustard, because Mrs Madden told me that mustard brings out the flavour of cheese. (It's supposed to be a pinch of mustard powder, but I don't have mustard powder.)

If I was baking this in the oven, I'd stir in my cooked pasta, probably top with slices of fresh tomato, sprinkle over a mixture of melted butter, breadcrumbs, and more cheese, and bake for 20 minutes or so until the top looked yummy; but as we were hungry I just stirred in the broccoli as well, and served up.

Mabel's looked like this. She ate about half the sausage, ignored the pasta (she eschews that particular shape), and bit some of the "leaves" off the "trees" and declared them yummy.

Mine looked like this. I ate it all and forcibly restrained myself from attacking the leftovers. Mostly.
Pizza tonight; pizza dough recipe (as if you needed another one) tomorrow.