Adventures in Cooking

So today, for the first time, I tackled actual cooking. I've been mostly eating frozen dinner-type things, sandwiches, cereal, that kind of thing. But I'd picked up some pasta at the Costcutters grocery on campus and decided that I was going to attempt macaroni and cheese. Because they don't really know what that is here, so if I wanted it, I had to make it the hard way. After doing some recipe comparison online, I figured that if I combined cheese, butter, and milk I should at least get something close to what I was going after. A lot of the recipes called for ground mustard. They don't have that here. Ditto anything resembling fresh herbs unless you go to a special produce market and even then they might not stock what you're looking for. Shredded cheese? Yeah, don't have that either. So, I basically was improvising. Butter doesn't come in sticks with the tablespoons helpfully marked. Instead, you just get a hunk of butter in a box. Lots and lots of guesswork went into this mac and cheese adventure.

I ended up cooking the pasta and then in a separate pan, melting butter with some milk, 2 kinds of cheddar cheese that I had to cut up by hand and some Boursin cheese (which I had never heard of, but a recipe I read used it and they happened to have it at my local Sainsbury's) with salt and pepper and a bit of flour to thicken. It was pretty funny in the kitchen because there were about 4 Americans who thought that I was either a genius or crazy, and a South African who was completely in awe of this whole process. "She's doing something that involves fancy cheese. Wait, now there's 2 kinds of cheese in that pot! I don't know what's going on but I know I want it... Three! Did you see that? She put 3 kinds of cheese in a pot! Although I don't know what you're doing with that pasta. Just eat the cheese. Anything with cheese has to be delicious." Us Yanks tried to explain that the pasta helped to deliver the cheese to your mouth but I think he was a bit skeptical. Heaven forbid we introduce him to fondue!

Anyway, once all the cheese was melted, I mixed in the shells and then baked it in the oven on some temperature that I think approximated 350 degrees until the cheese on top was beginning to get brown and crispy. And it was absolutely delicious. Yum. Of course, I have a ridiculous amount of leftovers, so I'll be eating mac and cheese for a few days, but I have proven that passable mac and cheese CAN be made in the UK with basically no familiar products. I'm going to count that a good day.