pease porridge

Smackaroni and Cheese

Some foods aim at pleasing our palate, others go for our heart; macaroni and cheese bypasses all that and goes straight for some undiscovered part of our primitive monkey brain.  Don't ask me how we monkeys developed a deep-seated biological need for the stuff, but lurking somewhere in our heads is the Platonic form of macaroni and cheese that we all strive for.

I suspect that it has something to do with the marketing people; commercials for various boxed products look so perfect that the disappointment when you actually taste one of said products is profound.  This dissonance creates some sort of Freudian phenomenon wherein we form an intense relationship with our inner macaroni and cheese.

Consider the recipe in the NYTimes (the article's expired, so I'm linking instead to Slate's review of the recipe) earlier this year that was one of the most emailed articles of that week.  It's clear that people yearn for something more than the macaroni and cheese that they've got.

This is where I come in, with a little help from Patrick O'Connell's Refined American Cuisine.  Don't worry!  This is not a frou-frou gourmet version; okay, well, yes it is, but if you leave off the shaved white truffle and the parmesan lace basket from the presentation, what you have left is the exact creamy, dreamy macaroni and cheese that you crave.

Manzo alla California

We just recently rented Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and I'm not going to comment on the quality of the movie itself, but in one scene Angelina serves up an utterly horrid-looking, potentially poisonsous pot roast.  Growing up, I was never a big fan of pot roast, and that desiccated hunk of meat garnished with withered carrots and onions near-to gave me flashbacks.

On the other hand, I love comfort foods, and I generally love cheap cuts of meat done up low and slow, so I'm always on the lookout for pot roast alternatives.  Manzo alla California is beef braised with cream.  The beef is kept moist by poking it with a knife all about and stuffing in little bits of pancetta, and the pot is deglazed with vinegar before you add the cream to it, which keeps it from being cloyingly rich and creamy.

By the way, the California in this recipe apparently refers to farm country in Lombardy, Italy, and not the West Coast state.  I served it with polenta, and I would've served it with braised greens if I had remembered to actually grab the greens when I was out shopping; we had to settle for a green salad instead.

Shepherd's Pie

Apparently, it's a Maine thing: as soon as it gets wintery out, you crave shepherd's pie; at least, that's what I've gathered from my extensive data sample of two local displaced Mainers who've recently told me that's what they really want for dinner (even though it's been in the fifties all week - not wintry at all by my (or Maine!) standards).

I don't think I ever had shepherd's pie growing up, although I think I may have had a version of cottage pie once or twice (shepherd's has lamb, cottage has beef), but I have never been one to say no to comfort food of any variety.  While I was reading up on shepherd's pie and looking for a good recipe, I somehow got the idea that you had to make it along with creamed spinach, so that's what I did.

Of course, both shepherd's pie and creamed spinach sounded a bit bland overall, so I ended up tinkering a bit with the traditional formulas.  I added some tourtière-style spices to the pie (the original is Emeril Lagasse's, from the Food Network's website), and I chose a recipe from the All Around the World Cookbook that's sort of a creamed spinach crossed with saag paneer (without the paneer).