Easy Recipes for College Kids

 Introduction

 I just took my daughter back down to Santa Barbara to resume college a couple days ago, and suddenly realized my wife and I forgot to teach her how to cook. So I’ve decided to put together a quick batch of really easy recipes for her, and why not share that with 3.4 billion others?

Bonus: I reached out to my bike team for recommendations. So you’ll get some time-honored recipes from a group of elite athletes (most of whom would agree with the motto, “eat to ride, ride to eat”).

Mashed potatoes

1 box instant mashed potato mix, any brand (though Idahoan was my favorite back in the ‘80s)

Salt

Butter

Follow instructions on instant mashed potato box. Serve and enjoy.

Tip: add salt and butter to taste (duh!). Bonus tip: pour some of these potato flakes into soups or sauces if they’re too thin and you’re too busy, stressed out, ignorant, etc. to fuss with corn starch.

Instant spuds ended up being my daughter’s first meal after we dropped her off last week. She sent the attached photo with the caption, “Eerily realistic.”

Mashed potatoes extraordinaire

Depending on your major and/or your time management skills, you might have the opportunity to make mashed potatoes properly.

A bunch of potatoes, preferably Yukon Gold but anything will do

Heavy whipping cream

Milk and/or buttermilk

Sour cream

Butter

Salt

Peel the potatoes. Do use only this Famos peeler, being careful to avoid harmful substitutes:

(Note: I’ve paraphrased the instructions that came with Campagnolo bicycle components, circa 1982, the full text being “do use only Campagnolo grease LB-100, being careful to avoid harmful substitutes.” Ironically, grease was the only thing Campagnolo sucked at manufacturing; almost any other bearing grease was superior. But I digress.)

Gouge the eyes out of the potatoes. Don’t skip this step because you could die! Then slice them into, like, eighths lengthwise. If the potatoes are very large, cut the slices in half.

Boil the potatoes, or better yet steam them if you have that kind of hardware, until they’re easy to pierce with a fork but aren’t yet starting to dissolve. Strain. Melt a bunch of butter in the pot. Add the potatoes and a splash or two of milk or buttermilk, just until they start to get creamy, and cook for a couple minutes over very low heat. Mash, using a potato masher, obviously. Add a nice glug of cream, and a serving-spoon-sized dollop of sour cream. Salt to taste. If you accidently let them get too waterlogged, cook over low heat for a while longer (if you have time), stirring continuously, until they’re thicker. If they’re kind of bland, add more cream, butter, salt, and/or sour cream.

Tip: Don’t skimp on the salt! If you don’t have high blood pressure, eating salt won’t cause it. Salt doesn’t just make food tastier—it makes it yummier. It’s really easy to fail to optimize your mashed potatoes by under-salting them.

Bonus tip: when eating, hollow out the middle of pile and fill this with butter. “Cap” it with potatoes until the butter is liquefied. Now you can dip each bite in the butter, so it’s right on the surface. This will give you more pure butter satisfaction than mixing it all in. Extra bonus tip: throw in stuff like carrots, onions, maybe some diced ham and call it Hutspot, explaining to your roommates that it’s Dutch. Won’t you look sophisticated!

Smotheretti

I named this dish myself because my cycling teammate didn’t give it a name (though he did write, “I was a chef in college and am happy to pass on my culinary legacy”).

1 can chili con carne, with or without beans

1 pound good spaghetti

Grated cheddar

Onion, diced (optional)

1 egg

Butter

Crystal sauce

Boil the pasta. Heat the chili. While the pasta is boiling, fry the egg in butter (try to sync this so it’s done at the same moment as the pasta). Strain the pasta and smother it with the chili. Grate cheese over the top and add the diced onion (unless you’re hoping to get lucky later in the Language Lab). Lay the egg on top and douse the whole thing with Crystal sauce.

Tip: do use only Crystal sauce, being careful to avoid harmful substitutes, such as Tabasco. Why? Crystal is just better. I don’t know why. Maybe I got turned off because my college roommate had a framed print of a bottle of Tabasco with the caption “HOT STUFF” and I was embarrassed for him. Or maybe it’s because Tabasco has all these varieties now (e.g., “cayenne garlic”) which I somehow find distasteful.

Baked potatoes

Potatoes, perhaps something hunky from Idaho

Butter

Sour cream

Chives or scallion

Diced onions

Preheat the oven to like 400 degrees. (Would 350 work? Probably.) Gouge the potatoes’ eyes out to prevent fatality. With a fork, stab each potato multiple times across pretty much the whole surface. Stab deep. If you’re stressed out, pretend you’re a murderer. Don’t skip this step. If you do, one or more potatoes could explode, which will not endear you to your roommates.

Place potatoes on a baking sheet and bake for a really long time. The most common rookie move is taking them out too early. They should be super wrinkly when you remove them. Otherwise they’re too firm and will not absorb butter properly. I have almost never overcooked baked potatoes and even when I did (due to forgetting all about them), they were still edible (just super chewy).

After serving, and before cutting into your potato, use all your fingers and both thumbs to palpate the potato, making little yipping “ouch” sounds because it’s so damn hot. You’re kind of mashing the potato inside its own skin. Then cut into it lengthwise, unless the skin has burst on its own (which is ideal). Salt it, butter it, add sour cream and chives or whatever (diced onions? sure!) but do not shake little Bacon Bits on there from a jar. That is so disgusting. If you want to fry your own bacon to a crisp and crumble that over your potato, well, that’s fine. Grated cheddar? Yeah, okay. Tip: if you’re trying to diet, overcook your baked potatoes so your jaw will tire out before you’ve overeaten. Bonus tip: don’t diet. Just exercise more.

Escargot

I received the following suggestion from a guy on my bike team who’s from France: “Escargots ? :) ez and yummy.” He didn’t elaborate. This really threw me for a loop. I mean, this dish might be easy if you used canned snails, but isn’t that antithetical to the entire idea of French cooking? I considered that perhaps my friend is getting ready to apply for citizenship and, just in case NSA operatives were eavesdropping on his email, he decided to say something that would establish how American he’d become … but then I realized this is just Covid-era madness on my part. More likely, he’s just so good at preparing escargot that he doesn’t consider it difficult. Assuming that with practice this dish can become easy, here is a good recipe:

50 live snails

Bay leaves

½ cup white wine

¼ cup vinegar

½ cup salt

½ cup light stock

2 cloves garlic

As noted in The Joy of Cooking, “The Romans, who were addicted to snails, grew them on ranches where they were fed special foods like bay, wine and spicy soups as preseasoning.” Think about this. What would a snail ranch look like? Did the Romans brand the snails? How did they keep the snails from escaping in the night? What did the fence look like? Joy goes on to say, “When snails feed in late spring and summer, they may indulge in some foliage inimical to humans and, if used during this period, must be placed in a covered basket in a cool place and starved for 48 hours. For the next ten days to two weeks, feed them on lettuce leaves, removing the old leaves and furnishing new ones every few days.” WTF?! Surely my bike team pal doesn’t take all this trouble. Even Martha Stewart would balk.

Fortunately, I talked to a chef once who described a faster methodology for cleaning out the snails: you feed them anise seed, which scours out their digestive tracts, shoving all the evil stuff right out their little snail anuses. The weird thing, as I recall this advice, is that I can remember highly specific things about the conversation, such as the venue, a tiny café in Aix-les-Bains, with giant windows, so smoke-filled you couldn’t see across it, so I sat outside with my family in the rain. But I don’t remember summoning the chef, nor how we possibly could have communicated effectively with my terrible French and his nonexistent English. It’s possible this conversation never actually happened, though the meal certainly did, and the escargot I ate at that little café were so drenched in butter I couldn’t taste anything else. (I hasten to point out that this was the only meal I ever had in France that wasn’t délicieux.)

So screw it. This isn’t an easy recipe at all. Trust me, you really don’t want to cook escargot in college. Tip: if you feel you must prepare escargot, perhaps because you take this post as some kind of challenge, and you want to look up recipes in Joy of Cooking, don’t bother looking for “escargot” in the index. They’re listed under “snails.”

Indoor “BBQ” chicken

What college kid has time to fire up the grill? And who among Gen Z even knows how? Are charcoal briquettes and lighter fluid even legal in your state, and don’t they cause cancer anyway? With this handy recipe, you don’t need to worry about any of that.

Chicken pieces

BBQ sauce

Butter

Salt

Buy a bunch of prepackaged chicken pieces (unless your campus community has a real butcher who’ll cut up a whole chicken for you, in which case have each breast cut in half while he’s at it). Butter a glass casserole dish. Place chicken in dish. Douse with KC Masterpiece Original barbecue sauce. Bake in the regular old oven at whatever temperature you feel like (when in doubt, just do 350 F, no matter what you’re baking). Bake until you know it’s done because you have a meat thermometer. Test early and often so you don’t overcook it. Serve with Minute Rice unless you have a rice cooker. Or serve with mashed or baked potatoes as above. Your meal should always have a protein, a starch, and a vegetable. Potatoes count as starch but not a vegetable. (“Vegetable” means that green thing you’d never actually buy or cook because college students never do, but I had to try.) Salt to taste. Tip: douse with Crystal sauce if you want a little kick, or if you get a self-satisfied feeling every time you use Crystal instead of Tabasco sauce.

Indoor “BBQ” chicken extraordinaire

Prepare Indoor “BBQ” chicken as above but use better barbecue sauce. I don’t have a specific recommendation but surely your friends and family have strong opinions on this, particularly if somebody buys it over the phone from his or her favorite BBQ joint in Texas or North Carolina.

SpaghettiOs

1 can SpaghettiOs

Two slices soft wheat bread

Peanut butter

Jelly or jam

If you think SpaghettiOs are passé, think again. They are very current and come in all kinds of shapes which change regularly. Right now you can even find Star Wars SpaghettiOs:

Zoom in and check it out: it even comes with Rey-shaped pasta. How would you like to be Daisy Ridley, to know that there’s actually a pasta shaped like your head, keeping in mind that 150 million cans of SpaghettiOs are sold each year? That’s when you know you’ve truly arrived.

This recipe couldn’t be simpler: pour the SpaghettiOs from the can into a saucepan or bowl and heat on the stove or in the microwave. Then dump it straight into the toilet (“cut out the middleman,” to paraphrase James Bond) and make yourself a PBJ. Why do SpaghettiOs exist?

Spaghetti with “special family recipe” sauce

Once a year (at least, when there’s not a pandemic or a death in the family), I host a giant pasta party for all my bike pals (road teammates and fellow mountain bike coaches). I slave for a day over my special Bolognese sauce (here’s the recipe) and serve it on my homemade pasta. When there were more young children at the party (i.e., before everybody got so damn old), I’d try to fill the children up on mac ‘n’ cheese (recipe here) or a more basic sauce that a rhesus monkey could make. (Children cannot appreciate Bolognese so it shouldn’t be wasted on them.) Invariably, I’d get some uncultured grown-up ranting and raving about my “other” sauce and how it’s “even better than the Bolognese.” They’d ask for the recipe, but I’d demur and tell them it’s a closely guarded family secret, since I obviously wouldn’t want to embarrass them by saying how utterly banal and unsophisticated the recipe really is. It’s two freaking ingredients, neither of them even slightly chichi.

1-pound log of Safeway house-brand Italian sausage

3 jars of cheap spaghetti sauce such as Prego

1 pound of dry pasta, whatever shape you want

Wedge of parmesan

Get the pasta boiling. Extrude the filmy, greasy sausage from the tube into a cold pan. Over medium heat, cook it until it’s not raw (duh!). Drain the fat if you must. Add the cheap sauce. Stir while heating. Strain the pasta and, if you’re feeling really gourmet, toss it with olive oil. Serve the sauce over the pasta and top with grated parmesan (grate it with a zester to be dazzling). If you’re a poor student, sprinkle instead with that horrid powdered parmesan in the green can, but do it ironically to preserve your culinary mystique. Sheesh.

Crock pot extravagaaaanza

Two of my teammates recommended small crock pots for cooking enough rice & beans to last for several meals. Here is a synthesis of their rough recipes.

Dry beans (kidney, pinto, maybe a combo)

Rice (or whatever whole grain)

Random veggies

Sauce (Crystal, soy, Worcestershire)

Spice (your favorite EZ blend, e.g. Mrs. Dash)

Cheese (optional)

Egg (optional)

Get a small crock pot, or a pressure cooker like the Instant Pot. Put the stuff in it in the morning and turn it on. Leave it on. Eat the contents for dinner and for breakfast and for lunch the next day. Add cheese and egg as desired (frankly, I don’t know when … probably at the end?). If you get tired of it, sex it up with more fixin’s or feed it to your roommate.

To be continued…

I received more recipes than I’d expected from friends, and found some old family recipes as well, so I’ve got enough material for another entire post! Click here for more super-easy and tasty recipes, whether you’re a college student yourself or looking to grow your repertoire of go-to lazy-day meals.

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

More COVID-19 Chronicles - Baking in Place

Note

This post is not about smoking weed while sheltering in place. It’s about actual baking. If you’re a ganja aficionado looking for hot tips on how to score the kindest bud, you’re on the wrong blog. Also, if you’re high right now, I guarantee you won’t make it to the end of this post. Maybe you can half-watch the vlog version, though:

Introduction

As we all shelter in place, it’s natural to think, “There’s must be more to life than working from home and watching Riverdale and Stranger Things.” So why not learn to bake? In this post I provide advice on how to source your ingredients during these trying times, and then I’ll walk you through some tried and true recipes and share some expert techniques.

Stocking your pantry

Stocking up on baking supplies is going to be very difficult during the pandemic due to all the hoarding that’s going on. The entire baking aisle has been ransacked … no flour, no sugar, no yeast. As if people even knew how to bake! This is what happens when everyone’s garage is packed to the gills with extra toilet paper but they still feel like they need to do something.

If you can’t find cake flour but do have all-purpose, here’s a neat tip from The Joy of Cooking: 

Cake flour is made of soft wheats, and their delicate, less expansive gluten bakes to a crumblier texture. Although you will not get the same result, in emergencies you may substitute 1 cup minus 2 tablespoons sifted all-purpose flour for 1 cup cake flour.

Note bene: it says right there, you can only make this substitution in emergencies. Well, guess what? The US has been formally declared to be in a state of national emergency, so you may make the substitution! Nobody will come after you … you are within your rights. 

But what if you can’t even find regular flour? Just keep looking! And do not, in desperation, resort to gluten-free flour. With all this coronavirus craziness, haven’t you suffered enough?

Finding unsalted butter is going to be a particular challenge. You have two options (beyond showing up within minutes of the store’s dairy delivery):

1. Go ahead and buy salted butter. How bad could it be? Surely a little salt never hurt a baked good? Just use less added salt in the recipe, and if it doesn’t call for any, just add more sugar. (Note: I haven’t actually tried this.)
2. Take off your damn surgical mask for a few seconds, let your glasses un-fog, and then stare really hard at the supermarket shelves. Look all around, scanning first left-to-right and then in an expanding spiral. After your eyes have roamed around long enough, they’ll get so tired you’ll be unable to focus and you’ll just sort of zone out, like looking at one of those Magic Eye autostereograms, and then suddenly you’ll see it: a block of super-fancy Irish unsalted butter that costs like $9 for half a pound. In fact there are two boxes left. Buy them both. Yes, it’s a ripoff, but remember, your 401(k) has lost like $300K in the last two months. It’s all Monopoly money now. Get that butter.

Now, yeast can be even harder to find right now. There are two ways forward. Option one: you could phone your mother-in-law and she’ll actually mail you some. This puts her at risk, though, as she must brave the post office because her mailman doesn’t pick up outgoing mail.

Option two: you could borrow some yeast from a neighbor. Remember, though, you can’t just walk over there and ring the doorbell. You’ll have to stake the place out. Stand in the driveway for as long as it takes for somebody to come out, knowing this could be days. (I know, that’s crazy—but do you want to bake or not?) If your neighbor doesn’t recognize you, back up an extra six feet and take your mask off momentarily. If you’re still not recognized, it’s because your hair has gone grey for the first time due to the salons being closed. Loudly announce yourself by name (but for God’s sake put your mask back on first, as loud voices more readily transmit the coronavirus)! Instruct your neighbor to leave the loaner yeast on your porch for you to retrieve later.

(Why wouldn’t you just get yeast from Amazon? Think about it. This is Amazon’s finest hour. They couldn’t have engineered a better way than COVID-19 to finally gratify their rabid appetite for total retail domination. Don’t let this pandemic be the death blow to all small businesses. Save that Prime membership for when things are back to normal!)

Now, if you run out of baking powder, that’s actually not so big a deal. You can make your own! It’s even easier than homemade hand sanitizer. All you do is substitute, for each teaspoon of baking powder, ½ teaspoon of cream of tartar, 1/3 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda, and 1/8 teaspoon salt. But don’t try to store this—use it right away. And don’t get all clever and add some Drano or Comet thinking that’ll protect you from the coronavirus. It won’t, and your baked goods will taste like store-bought.

Okay, enough about ingredient sourcing. It’s time to explore some classic recipes.

Gold layer cake

2 cups cake flour (remember, subtract 2 tbsp if using all-purpose!)

2 tsp double-acting baking powder

¼ tsp salt

½ cup butter

1 cup sifted sugar

3 egg yolks

1 tsp vanilla

¾ cup milk

Lemon custard or raspberry jam

Whipped cream (not from a can!)

2 small children

Have all ingredients at about 70 degrees, except the children, who should be at about 99. Sift the flour. Resift with the baking powder and salt. At this point in the preparation the two children should come running through the kitchen, fighting as they go, and knock the mixing bowl from your hands. About half the dry ingredients should end up on the floor. Using the kind of right-brain, gut-fueled math that chickens employ when they bob their heads while walking, figure out how to add back in the right combination of dry ingredients to replace what you lost. Now cream the butter, work in the sugar and egg yolks, add the vanilla, and mix together all the ingredients, gradually, in 3 parts, alternating with the milk, though at this point you’re too furious to really follow these directions very carefully—everything has frankly become a bit of a blur. 

Stir the batter until smooth. Bake in two greased layer pans about 25 minutes at 375 degrees. When both you and the cake have cooled off, use a long serrated knife to slice off the convex part of each layer, so they’ll be flat. Take the part you cut off and shovel it into your mouth. “Holy shit,” you’ll say, “that’s amazing.” This will be the best cake ever, trust me. Your kids will run over and start cramming cut-off bits into their mouths too, and nobody will be able to believe how phenomenally good this cake is. As if it were even necessary at this point, assemble the cake layers with the lemon custard or jam between, and coat it with the whipped cream.

Now, if you don’t have two small children, and don’t dump half your dry ingredients on the floor, and just follow the more basic recipe, will the cake still turn out? It will be … okay. Just okay. For it to work right, you need the accident to happen. Don’t ask me why.

Sugarless chocolate cake

10.5 oz unsweetened chocolate

10.5 oz unsalted butter (or regular butter in a pinch)

6 eggs

½ cup almond flour

1 cup powdered erythritol (C₄H₁₀O₄)

Melt the butter and chocolate. Beat the eggs until foamy, then add the sweetener, and mix. Add the butter and chocolate, along with the almond flour, and stir just until combined. Bake in a greased pan at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes. When it has cooled, dust with cocoa powder and then throw the whole thing straight into the garbage. When your kids protest, shriek at them, “People are dying, and you’re all broken up about not getting to eat a stupid cake that’s totally disgusting anyway, due to having no sugar?! Really?!” That ought to teach them a lesson. The little bastards.

Scones

Sift together in a large bowl:

   1¾ cups sifted all-purpose flour

   2¼ tsp double-acting baking powder

   1 tbsp sugar

   ½ tsp salt

Cut into these ingredients, until the size of small peas, using a pastry blender or 2 knives:

   ¼ cup cold butter

Wait a second. Cut into them? Size of small peas? Two knives? Sounds like a lot of hassle! And look at the ratio of ingredients: a single tablespoon of sugar, and a quarter cup of butter? Scones are ridiculous. If you think these things are worth the inevitable heart attack, why not just peel a stick of butter like a damn banana, and eat that? Go ahead. You’ve earned it.

Uncle Max’s 2D biscuits

Sift together:

   1 ¾ cups sifted all-purpose flour

   ¼ tsp yeast

   ½ tsp salt

   2 tsp double-acting baking powder

   2 tsp sugar

   ½ tsp baking soda

Cut in:

   ¼ cup lard (yeah, baybee!) or 5 tbsp unsalted butter

Add and lightly mix:

   ¾ cup buttermilk

Turn the dough onto a floured board. Knead it gently for 30 seconds. Pat the dough until it’s ¼” thick. Cut with a biscuit cutter. Bake 10-12 minutes. Note that the biscuits will not rise, due to the yeast being dead. It expired in 2012. What the hell were you thinking? Didn’t I give you two perfectly good strategies for obtaining fresh yeast? These biscuits will be so flat, you’ll practically lose sight of them when turning them sideways. Serve them anyway and tell your family it’s matzo.

Mom’s amazing boule

Note: these ingredient quantities are for a 4 quart Dutch oven (i.e., the kind of shallow, enameled, cast-iron covered pot that costs like a gazillion dollars). If you don’t own one of these, now’s a great time to buy one online. I mean, what else are you gonna spend your money on right now?

3 cups white flour

½ tsp non-dead or undead yeast

1 ½ tsp sea salt

1 ½ cups warm water

Dissolve yeast in water. If you’re not sure it’s alive, take some more of it from the package and put it in warm water with a little sugar, and wait 5-10 minutes. It should get all bubbly. (This is called proofing.) If it doesn’t bubble up, your yeast is dead! Damn it, how could you let this happen again?! Go back to the earlier step of hustling up fresh yeast wherever you can. Then, combine dry ingredients, and add the water/yeast solution and combine well. Cover with plastic wrap and a damp towel. Let sit at room temperature for 18-24 hours.

Heat oven to 450 degrees. Place Dutch oven with lid in (actual) oven to heat up. Transfer dough to floured surface—it will be almost sticky—and form into a round boule. Use as little flour as possible! Place round on a piece of parchment strewn with coarse cornmeal.

When Dutch oven is hot—after about 1/2 hour—take it out, carefully, using a proper potholder that your mom sewed, not one of those stupid knitted ones you got at the middle school craft fair, because with that knitted kind your thumb will go right through it and you’ll burn the crap out of yourself, causing you to drop the Dutch oven on the floor, barely missing your foot due to your catlike reflexes but denting the hardwood floor because the Dutch oven weighs like a gazillion pounds. When you’re done cussing and running cold water over your thumb, place dough with parchment into Dutch oven, replace lid, and slide into oven; reduce heat to 425 and bake for 30 minutes. Remove lid and bake for another 15 minutes until nicely browned. Cool on rack; cover with towel. Eat with good butter—salted, perhaps, just to use it up because that’ll give you a smug feeling, knowing you can buy more salted butter easily, though deep down inside you’re wondering: how did we get to this place, where we can get a smug feeling just from eating butter?!

Other notes: did I forget something? Like, kneading the bread? Who ever heard of bread dough you don’t need to knead? Believe it! You really only knead this for about 10 seconds before forming it into the round. Also, you can slash the dough in a pattern just before baking if you wish. Optional: give it a second rise of 2-3 hours before baking, and/or add 1 tbsp vinegar to dough before first rise. If your Dutch oven is larger than 3-4 quarts, adjust recipe accordingly so your bread is not too flat.

By the way, I feel honor-bound to point out that the photo below is from my mom (as is this recipe). I’ve never baked bread in my life. (But the burned thumb due to knitted potholder? Yeah, that was me.)

Calzone

Follow the instructions in your favorite pizza recipe, except when it’s time to move the unbaked pizza from the cutting board to the heated pizza stone, fumble it completely so it is not longer even remotely disk-shaped, but more closely resembles a deflated basketball. Cover any gaping holes with bits of dough, performing dough-grafts by harvesting from other parts of what is now, let’s face it, a calzone. Lower the oven heat because this bad boy is going to have to bake slowly for a long time so the middle isn’t raw. Would it help to try to stuff some ricotta in there? No … I think you’ve caused enough damage already.

Virtual baking

Binge-watch The Great British Bake Off while practicing calligraphy.

Flourless chocolate cake

This is a great recipe for when you can’t buy flour, duh!

¾ cup unsalted butter

12 oz. bittersweet baking chocolate

6 eggs

1 ¼ cups sugar

1 tsp salt

1 tsp vanilla

Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream (because it’s just about the only brand left with real vanilla and no “natural flavors” by which the food industry means “artificial flavors”)

Brandy or chocolate liqueur

Chop chocolate into ½” pieces. Put in saucepan with butter and cook over low heat until melted. Let this cool until it’s room temperature. While it’s cooling, beat together eggs, vanilla, salt, and sugar, using an electric mixer at full blast. It should be thick enough to form little crests, more like waves than dunes. Gently mix with chocolate mixture but don’t overdo it. Pour into darling little ramekins that you’ve buttered generously. Bake for about 20 minutes. Be sure to test the mini-cakes for doneness by putting a fork in them. If the fork comes out clean, it’s time to take them out of the oven and serve them warm with vanilla ice cream. Actually, you baked the little cake-lets way too long and they’ve turned into little hockey pucks. You’ll know you’ve failed when your small children only pick at them, and/or try to lever them out of the ramekins and hide them under a napkin.

After a reasonable period of mourning—perhaps a week is enough since pandemic time crawls by so slowly—try again with a whole new batch of ingredients. This time, take the little cakes out of the oven a lot earlier, so they are almost still a liquid. They should jiggle just a little. Again, serve them warm. Now they’re underdone but you’ve already added the ice cream so it’s a little late to put them back in the oven. Instead, drizzle them with 2-3 tbsp of brandy or liqueur, and then drink a large tumbler of it, neat. See? Your stupid cake is getting better already. Next, leave your rapidly puddling dessert on the table, abandon your family sitting there, take the bottle of brandy or liqueur with you to the living room, and binge-watch Tiger King. There. Now you’re sheltering in place!

More reading on the pandemic

• Shelter-in-Place FAQ
• E-Book Options During COVID-19 Lockdown
• Is Cycling Safe During the COVID-19 Pandemic?
• The Toilet Paper Hoarding Conundrum
• When Will the Pandemic End?
• What Are Hospitals Like During the Pandemic?
• How to Talk to Your Cat About COVID-19
• Teleworking During the COVID-19 Pandemic
• Why Don’t The Dutch Wear COVID Masks?
• Travel Tips During the COVID-19 Pandemic
• COVID Wristbands

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Homemade Macaroni & Cheese

Introduction

Sometimes you just need some starch. Whether you’ve had a hard workout or a hard day, nothing really satisfies like a giant plate of pasta. Sure, there are sophisticated ways of serving it, like with a Bolognese Ragù or a rich Alfredo, but what if you’re in a rush and/or don’t have a lot of high-end ingredients on hand? Or what if you need to satisfy your Philistine children? Well, that’s when you need some good old fashioned macaroni and cheese. I’m not talking about that lowbrow crap from a box, either. I mean the good stuff. In this post I’ll tell you, and show you, how it’s done.

As no other organizing structure suggests itself to me, I’ll give you this dispatch in the (perhaps mythic) who-what-where-when-why-how style of the newspaper reporter. In case you’re an albertnet newbie, I should warn you that I beat around the bush quite a bit on this blog, feeling that this beating is a) kind of the point, and b) something you probably deserve. If you just want the recipe, search within this page on “the actual recipe” which is buried way down in the “how” section.

Who, where, and when

Instead of telling you who makes this excellent dish, I’ll tell you who, weirdly, doesn’t: Irma S. Rombauer. Her Joy of Cooking, that indispensable cookbook no kitchen is complete without, has recipes for everything you could dream of, plus a lot of foods you’d never dream of. For example, it’s got recipes for cooking squirrel, opossum, and raccoon. In fact, the original edition (of which I’m a proud co-owner) shows you how to skin one of these varmints.

I love the boot in that drawing. You know those trendy “nose to tail” restaurants that emphasize using every part of the animal? Well, that’s nothing: how about using every part of the animal kingdom? These modern restaurants have got nothing on Ms. Rombauer.

That’s why it’s so utterly weird that The Joy of Cooking doesn’t have a recipe for macaroni and cheese. It’s so strange: the closest it comes is “boiled macaroni with cheese” and “baked macaroni.” The first is too simple (it couldn’t possibly produce the fully integrated flavor sensation we’re looking for, being basically cheese thrown on pasta) and the second looks like a lot of hassle: it sends you off to a separate recipe for “AU GRATIN III” which includes a lot of nonsense instructions like “the finished result should be neither powdery nor rubbery but ‘fondant.’”

The question of where is surprisingly relevant here: you can make this just about anywhere, so long as you have a couple of flames (one for the pasta water, one for the pan). This isn’t true of just any recipe. Sometimes a foreign kitchen just throws off your game. I’m up at my mom’s place in Oregon, where my brother Geoff’s pizza dough got a bit screwed up the other night by a strange oven that didn’t provide the right yeast-rising climate. I feel my brother’s pain: I once tried to make my Mexican-style rice at a friend’s apartment in NYC where the ingredients at the local grocery came (apparently) from Mars. But this mac ‘n’ cheese recipe is so simple, very few such pitfalls exist. The most basic kitchen tools and pantry will do.

On to when: as I touched on earlier, this is the dish you make when you’re tired, your brain is fried, your kids are disgruntled and in need of simple starchy love, you don’t have time to shop, and/or you lack the brain energy to do anything even slightly complicated. It’s an alternative to take-out, delivery, or a frozen dinner (if you even stock that sort of thing). Through this culinary mac ‘n’ cheese miracle, one moment you’re a burned-out cog of corporate industry ready to put your head in the oven, and the next moment you’re calmer than a mindful yogi, and a hero to your children.

What

My recipe is for the most basic version of this dish. I know it’s traditional and delicious to bake mac ‘n’ cheese in the oven with a bread-crumb topping, and my brother Max has even made his own bread crumbs for this purpose. A friend, emailing me years ago with a restaurant recommendation, wrote that Nizza la Bella has “the best macaroni and cheese in any restaurant I've ever had (the macaroni gran pere, baked, not that runny slop they serve at trendy macaroni specialty restaurants in utterly hapless Oakland).” Obviously there is ample opportunity to make this dish gourmet.

But I’ve never done that and I won’t start now. First of all, if I had that much energy, I’d make something fancier to begin with, like fettuccine Alfredo, maybe with homemade noodles. Second, pasta + bread crumbs = double-starch, which I’ve never seen the point of. (It’s like potato slices on pizza … what’s up with that?) To go to the extra trouble with bread crumbs, when this mac ‘n’ cheese is so good as-is, would be like putting one of those little cocktail umbrellas in a glass of beer.

Speaking of beer, check out this mac ‘n’ cheese themed Beck’st my friend John sent me years ago:

He’d just been on a brutal bike ride, he wrote, “so I made some celebratory macaroni and cheese with caramelized onions and linguiça sausage and peas. The cheese sauce is a combination of cheddar and Parmesan Reggiano. And I washed it down with the local lager.” Needless to say, I challenged him on that being macaroni at all (trying, alas unsuccessfully, to coax him and the rest of the Beck’st recipients into a debate about the correct translation of “farfalle”). He replied, “Dude, I know that’s farfalle — or ‘laços’ as they’re called here in Portugal — I was just testing you! Making sure you’re not falling asleep. However, if I make a cheese sauce (from scratch, as I do) and pour it over a pasta-like product, I have ipso facto and without question made ‘macaroni and cheese.’ You and your rules…”

Actually, I am not a purist when it comes to this dish. I have made it with macaroni, shells, farfalle, fusilli, cellentani, campanelle, rigatoni, penne, and orecchiette. I’ve used all kinds of different cheeses—whatever’s in the fridge—and I’ve added ham, peas, and even hot dog slices, for crying out loud. The basic recipe is completely adaptable and extendable, as you’ll see if you ever make it to the “how” section of this post. But first:

Why

Why take even this much trouble? Why not just make mac ‘n’ cheese from the box, like in college? Well, for one thing, once you’ve got the hang of this recipe (and really, it’s not hard, trust me), it doesn’t actually take any longer. Meanwhile, the stuff from the box doesn’t give you much yield, and if you scale it up enough to feed a hungry family, that’s a lot of wasteful packaging, and probably costs more than doing it right. Finally, there’s the matter of what you ingest.

When a product has to say, “No artificial flavors or dyes,” we’re into “thou doth protest too much” territory, like being on a first date where your date says, apropos of nothing, “Don’t worry, I don’t have any STDs … I just got tested!” And when you look at the boxed mac ingredients, you see all kinds of stuff you wouldn’t use if cooking for yourself:

The second ingredient is glycerol monostearate, whatever that is. And why couldn’t they get by with regular monoglycerides … why did they have to use acetylated monoglycerides? Okay, I’m sure somebody’s dad is a chemist and could tell us that sodium alginate and oleoresin are totally harmless, but should that be good enough? Here’s a rule of thumb: if an ingredient isn’t in your spell-checker, and/or your kid can’t pronounce it, maybe it doesn’t belong in your mouth.

And that’s just the ingredients the boxed mac manufacturers tell you about. You know the little paper/foil packet with the powdered cheese? It’s not an ingredient, of course, but it’s the reason you ingest phthalates every time you make boxed mac ‘n’ cheese. Just look at that word: “phthalates.” That’s some seriously fucked up spelling, the kind of consonant cluster that just says “dangerous chemical.” This article explains the problem and though it tells us not to panic, I’m still a little put off. Among other things, we’re warned, phthalates “can disrupt the production of testosterone.” Them’s fightin’ words!

“But wait,” you’re saying, “I’ve been boycotting Kraft for years, and only eat Annie’s boxed mac ‘n’ cheese!” Hey, me too, but we’re still not out of the woods. I consulted the Annie’s website and found that although they do address this issue, their answer is disconcertingly more complicated than “no phthalates.” In a nutshell, the level of phthalates in their product is below the European Food Safety Authority acceptable threshold (the US doesn’t have one yet). The Annie’s website states, “We are working with our trusted suppliers to understand where phthalates are coming into our supply chain and how we can evaluate and limit them.” This is all very reassuring, but no match, in my opinion, for good old fashioned home cooking. (Full disclosure: I still keep Annie’s around for when my younger daughter has to fend for herself.)

How

Okay, on to the actual recipe. The gist is this: you’re going to start with an easy white sauce called a roux. (It’s different from the dark roux used in southern or Cajun cooking. Kind of a Midwest roux, you might say.) This is the base that you’ll grate hella cheese into. Stir the pasta in and you’re done. (Here’s a Tom Swifty on the topic: “‘Ugh, I shouldn’t have eaten so much white sauce,’ Tom said ruefully.”)

You’ll need just six ingredients: 

• Any variety of short, stubby pasta (and any brand ... De Cecco, Barilla, American Beauty, Golden Grain, house brand … doesn’t matter)
• White flour (though wheat flour will work fine)
• Milk (whole, skim, part-skim, organic, not-organic, pretty much anything but non-dairy “milk” or chocolate milk, which I haven’t tried yet)
• Cheese (sharp, mild, cheddar, Swiss, gouda, just about whatever you’ve got except American/Velveeta, which is not food)
• Salt (Morton’s, iodized, non-iodized, house brand, fancy-pants sea salt, whatever)
• Pepper (basic pre-ground, fresh ground, ground from green peppercorns, ground from a four-foot-long grinder, whatever)

Here’s what I came up with at my mom’s house:

Using a fancy-pants pasta like cavatappi can impress your dinner guests, though classic elbows are, well, classic. I was cooking for a big group so I doubled the recipe, and had to mix pasta shapes. No problem: just compare the cooking times and delay appropriately before adding the faster-cooking pasta.

So here’s what you do. Put a big pot of water on the stove and read albertnet while it reaches a boil. (That’s right, you can wait and make the sauce in the mere 10 minutes required for the pasta to cook!) Salt the water and throw the pasta in. Now, in a large paella pan or Dutch oven, melt the butter over medium/high heat. How much? I guess something like three tablespoons per batch, a batch being defined as the amount one pound of pasta will yield. Once the butter is melted, gradually add flour, stirring continuously until you get a nice paste.

How much flour? Well, not so much that the paste loses its buttery taste. Just two or three tablespoons for a single batch. You should end up with a ball of paste the color of yellow teeth and about the size of a young mouse. (I realize these aren’t very appetizing comparisons … what can I say?)

Hey, don’t forget to stir the pasta occasionally!

Now you start gradually adding the milk to the paste. The milk might sizzle a bit in the pan, which is fine, but the heat should be low enough that nothing scorches. Integrate the milk and paste gradually, using a whisk. Keep adding milk, gradually turning your paste into a thin roux.

When you’re done the sauce should be about the consistency of paint. Salt and pepper to taste. Now you start grating the cheese in there. You can have your kid grate the cheese into a giant mound on a plate while you’re doing the sauce, or you can have your kid stir the sauce while you grate the cheese right into it. You’ll know you’ve grated enough cheese in there when the sauce is almost as thick as pudding, or when your kid stops yelling, “More cheese!” Give it a taste. The cheesy flavor should be intense. If it’s not, add more cheese. Or add more cheese for no good reason. It’s hard to go wrong … just don’t add so much that it gets greasy. That’s never happened to me, but doesn’t mean it’s not possible.

The cheese sauce should be ready right about the time the pasta is done. (By the way, this isn’t the time to show off how sophisticated you are by undercooking the pasta. This is comfort food, damn it! Cook it all the way.) Strain the pasta, pour it in the cheese sauce, and stir away. The only tricky part about this step is managing not to drool into the pan. Turn off your overhead fan so you can hear the tantalizing sound this stirring makes. It should sound like walking through thick mud. Here’s some video … turn the volume up!

For this last step, you should gather everyone around to “help.” This might be one of the few family activities left that can make your kids literally jump for joy. If one of your kids already went off to college, text her a link to the movie with a heartwarming caption like “HOW YA LIKE ME NOW!?” If all of your kids have left for college, it’s okay to cry into the sauce, so long as you’re not wearing mascara.

Now, if there’s any flaw to this dish, besides its being basically nothing but refined starch and saturated fat, it’s that the color is just a bit on the pallid side. So you’ll want to serve it with colorful, salubrious vegetables, like really good red tomatoes. (No corn, dammit! That’s even more pallid, and it’s just another starch!) Up at my mom’s place, I scrounged up some frozen green beans and dry-farmed tomatoes at the last minute. NOOICE!

Counterpoint

Is it responsible parenting to serve this starch ‘n’ fat bomb? Well, probably not. But you can limit the damage by loading your kid’s plate up with vegetables, and not letting him or her have a second helping of mac ‘n’ cheese until that plate is clean. And let’s be realistic: the odds are very high that your kid—yes, your kid!—will become a young adult who makes mac ‘n’ cheese from the box on a somewhat regular basis. If you can teach this basic technique, you might just help your family win the War on Phthalates!

A final note

Here’s a handy tech tip for storing the rest of that block of cheese. When you first cut into the plastic wrapper, start a few inches from the end. Cut it cleanly all the way around. Now you have a “cap” that you can slip down over the brick, and don’t need to waste extra plastic. This short documentary film explains it better.

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Ask Dr. Chocolate

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and instances of grossness.

Dear Dr. Chocolate,

In the spirit of DIY, I’m going to make my own candy!  Do you have any pointers for the adventurous novice chocolatier?

Sandra M, Cheney, WA

Dear Sandy,

Don’t do it.  You might be a great cook, and heck, you might even be a great baker, but candy is really, really hard.  Just go buy some.  Seriously.

Dear Dr. Chocolate,

In a letter years ago, you said some very harsh things about carob.  In fact, if I remember correctly, you described it the way religious people write about Hell, or the way Berkeley liberals (i.e., Berkeley residents) talk about Trump.  Why?

Mark Hodges

Berkeley, CA

Dear Mark,

The problem with carob is that you don’t see it coming.  If I had my way, the FDA would require carob-infested products to glow bright green, like antifreeze, as a warning.  When I was a kid, my dad’s girlfriend made a batch of what she called “hypoglycemic fudge,” only she didn’t tell us that up front.  She just served it.  Slicing off a giant wedge, I found the consistency to be perfect under the knife.  My mouth was actually watering as I took a large bite.  Tooth-feel was exquisite and for a fraction of a second I thought it was perfect fudge—but then the flavor hit my tongue.  I couldn’t have been more stunned if it had been made with dog shit.  But I had to pretend to like it.  Carob is so bitter, and so was I.

Carob is one of those substitutes that falls so far short, it just reminds you what you’re missing.  It belongs in the Hall of Shame with such villainous products as microwave popcorn, Tang, Velveeta, powdered milk, soy cheese, and Tofutti.

Dear Dr. Chocolate,

Your syndicated column covers all kinds of candy, from caramels to fruit chews to chocolate fudge.  Why not call yourself Dr. Candy?

Louise R, Tempe, AZ

Dear Louise,

It’s simply because my last name really is Chocolate.  It has nothing to do with “Dr. Chocolate” having a nice ring to it, or with “Candy” sounding like the name of a porn star.  And no, I’m not kidding about my last name.  It’s right there on my birth certificate (though it’s spelled A-L-B-E-R-T).

Dear Dr. Chocolate,

I’m thinking it would be really fun to make homemade fudge with my teenage daughter!  Do you have a good recipe to share?

Emily M, Anaheim, CA

Dear Emily,

I get so many letters asking for recipes, I feel like I have to answer at least a few of them—but  as I’ve said before, just don’t do it!  It’s fine to try your hand at a soufflé or at brewing your own beer, but candy is hard—really hard.  I know this from bitter experience:  as a teenager, I tried to make divinity with my brother.  In the process we invented a new kind of plastic.  The cooking pot actually had to be thrown away.  My mom was livid.

Now, if you’re bound and determined to do this, you’re on the right track asking for a recipe.  No, I won’t provide one—I refuse to get involved in your doomed effort—but I will steer you toward a good source.  Go see if “Real Simple” online has a recipe, because I used to get that magazine and once found a recipe for ice cream sandwiches (look, here it is now!).  Just three ingredients (ice cream, cookies, and toppings), and one easy step.  That’s the kind of recipe you want.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the recipe for “Fudge Cockaigne” in The Joy of Cooking.  My teenage daughter made that—or, rather, a failed approximation of that—today.  (Did I help?  No—I refused, even when she was totally underwater and begging for assistance.)  Check out this instruction:  “When nearing 234 degrees, there is a fine overall bubbling with, simultaneously, a coarser pattern, as though the fine bubbled areas were being pulled down for quilting into the coarser ones.”  Are you kidding me?  What’s amazing is that my daughter read the recipe first, three times over, but instead of running screaming from the room, she shrugged and thought, “How hard could it be?”

The answer?  Very hard.  Look at the sludge she came up with, $12 in ingredients and two hours later:

Actually, you know what?  Go for it.  Make Fudge Cockaigne with your daughter.  Destroy a perfectly good cooking pot in the process.  Consider your kitchen a microcosm for the doomed, futile world we’re stuck in.  Teach your daughter to give up on her big ideas—might as well get that over with.  All is vanity.  The center cannot hold.

Dear Dr. Chocolate,

I’ve heard some great things about chocolate, such as its antioxidant qualities and the fact that it raises HDL.  Is this wishful thinking, or is there science behind it?

Tom G, Brooklyn, NY

Dear Timmy G,

If you look closely at any chocolate product, you’ll see this fine print:  “Purported benefits of chocolate have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.  This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”

Okay, you won’t see any such thing.  But while you’re looking at the fine print, check the ingredients to make sure you’re really eating chocolate, and nothing but chocolate.  You know what “natural flavors” means?  It basically means artificial flavors.  “Natural” means “not created in a test tube,” but it doesn’t mean your “chocolate” or “chocolate flavored” or “chocolaty” confection tastes like chocolate for the right reason (i.e., being actual chocolate).  If food scientists discover that giraffe semen imparts a chocolaty flavor, they can add it under the “natural flavor” label.  And as far as I know, giraffe semen isn’t an antioxidant.  So whatever the benefits of chocolate, don’t forget that it contains sugar and fat and often a whole lot of other crap that certainly isn’t good for your health.

(Okay, I don’t know that giraffe semen is actually used for flavoring.  But vanillan, often found in “chocolate” products, can be made from wood pulp, creosote, and even cow dung, which would qualify as a “natural” flavor.  Vanillan is also commonly biosynthesized.  Yum!)

Dear Dr. Chocolate,

I read an article about this stoner-type college dropout who, after an epiphany on a ski lift, decided to become a chocolatier (even though he had never liked chocolate), and with some cash from his mother and his uncle, he started a chocolate company called Dagoba that was eventually bought out by Hershey so now he’s rich.  So candy must be pretty easy to make!  Why wouldn’t I give it a try?

Mark R, Grand Junction, CO

Dear Mark,

Go for it.  Just don’t bring my name into it.  And you might take a lesson from the Dagoba guy, who made his first batch by “melt[ing] two batches of organic chocolate,infusing one with milk chai, the other with raspberries and rose hips.”  That is to say, one of the ingredients in his candy was:  candy.  See?  He was following the “Real Simple” model!  So as you go into business “making” candy, try to find the right balance between food science and marketing.

Dear Dr. Chocolate,

Why can’t we have more candy?  It’ll get us out of your hair and stop our petty sibling feuds, and as an added bonus, it will slowly poison us so that you eventually won’t have to deal with us anymore.  From a logical standpoint, the answer to your child-rearing problems seems obvious.  I trust you will take the reasonable course of action and we will be seeing some serious changes in your parenting style soon.

A.A., Albany, CA

Dear “A.A.”,

I told you not to bother me when I’m working!  And I’m not in a very charitable mood right now after your disastrous experiment with the Fudge Cockaigne.  I told you I wanted a forensic level of kitchen cleanup, and the floor in there still looks like a dog had diarrhea on it.  Now get back in there and finish cleaning!

Dear Dr. Chocolate,

What is the deal with white chocolate, anyway?

Martin S, Saratoga, CA

Dear Martin,

It’s a lot of B.S., if you ask me.  It’s not chocolate—not really.  It doesn’t have any actual cocoa, just “cocoa butter,” that fatty stuff they make lotion and ointment out of.  White chocolate is to actual chocolate what Red Vines are to real licorice.

Dear Dr. Chocolate,

Please help—my husband is driving me crazy!  He’s always buying this fancy-pants dark chocolate and with every new kind he finds, the percentage of cacao is higher and he’s that much more sanctimonious about it.  I don’t even enjoy eating it anymore—the bitter crap he’s bringing home is like what my mom used to bake with.  If an authority figure like you stuck up for traditional chocolate, that might finally sway him.

Linda S, Austin, TX

Dear Linda,

I won’t go on record supporting milk chocolate, which I don’t care for, but you’re exactly right—there’s a point of diminishing returns as chocolate goes too far upscale.  You start seeing added stuff like cayenne pepper or bacon bits or 18-karat gold thread or whatever and it becomes absurd.  Remind your husband that chocolate is a candy, not a pissing contest.  And then buy your own chocolate because he’s not going to listen to you.

Dear Dr. Chocolate,

I’m halfway into making vanilla taffy for the first time, and this recipe is telling me to pour the molten candy mixture onto a marble slab.  I don’t have a marble slab!  What can I use in a pinch?  Please reply soon!

Leyla A, Seattle, WA

Dear Leyla,

I guess you’re new to my column!  Who told you making taffy was a good idea?  My advice is to pour that onto something smooth and slick but also expendable, like the glossy cover of an old copy of “Real Simple.”  And then throw it away.

Dear Dr. Chocolate,

There’s this one episode of “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” where Mr. Rogers has this cotton candy machine, and this chef stops by to make some cotton candy.  There’s some really intense Alpha Dog stuff going on there, a simmering duel of one-upmanship lurking just beneath the politeness.  Definitely worth watching.  Check it out in the archives!

Sean L, Arlington, VA

Dear Sean,

Noted.

Dear Dr. Chocolate,

Screw it, I’m going to See’s.  I know that’s not a question.  I just thought you might want to know.

A.A., Albany, CA

Dear A.A.,

Be sure to bring your house key.  And pick me up a couple of Toffee-Ettes.

Dr. Chocolate is a syndicated columnist whose advice column, “Ask Dr. Chocolate,” appears in over 400 blogs worldwide.

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