Mac & Cheese w/Bechamel Cheese Sauce

This is a bit of work, but once you learn how to do it this way, it is by far the best mac & cheese method.

Ingredients:
- cooked pasta (elbow noodles work well)
- 1 + 1/4 cup grated cheese (experiment! Melody likes a Mexican cheese blend)
- 1/4 cup butter
- 1/4 cup flour
- 2 cups whole milk
- bread crumbs (Panko is great)
- seasoning (salt, pepper, nutmeg is awesome! Anything else you like)

Bechamel is a French white sauce, and if you learn how to make it, it is also a great way to make Fettuccine Alfredo and many other things. A bechamel is made from yet another French technique call a roux.

Here is the hierarchy:
> Mac & Cheese
>>> Bechamel
>>>>>> Roux

This all goes very fast, so first you need to do your "mise en place", which is French for "get all your f'ing ingredients ready before starting to cook".

Mise en place:

So, we make the roux first. A roux is browned butter and flour.

Then Bechamel is then made by adding milk to the roux.

Then the Mac & Cheese sauce is made by adding cheese to the bechamel.

There are a couple important things to make roux and bechamel:

1. The ratio is important - for the roux, you use 1 part butter and 1 part flour. For the bechamel, you use 8 parts milk to 1 part roux.

2. The roux is made first by melting butter and stirring in flour. This actually has to cook together 1-3 minutes, and just brown slightly. You are actually cooking the flour in butter. If you don't cook the flour, it will taste like raw flour (imagine eating a spoon of flour... not good).

3. You need a whisk, and you need to stir constantly over the right heat. The heat is pretty low, but still high enough to get things bubbling gently.

4. Important!! Season your bechamel - put in a little salt as your cooking it, and taste often. It is difficult to season this after the fact. You can add other spices, like nutmeg, pepper, paprika, it is great to experiment. But salt is pretty important or it just tastes pasty.

If you do those things right, you will have an excellent bechamel.

Once you have made bechamel, you can melt cheese into it - right away!! Don't wait. The result is the best mac & cheese sauce possible.

The ratios stay constant, and in our case to make enough bechamel cheese sauce to cover 1 box of macaroni, you need:

1/4 butter
1/4 cup flour (1:1 flour/butter makes roux)
2 cups milk (8:1 milk to roux)
1 1/4 cup cheese

Watch this video - great explanation of bechamel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aeCJGmEXqE

Mix your COOKED pasta with your finished bechamel. It's good to do this in a large bowl to get everything even.

Put in a baking dish, and sprinkle the top with breadcrumbs.

Bake in a 350 degree oven about 20 minutes - wait for the top to brown, and maybe a little bubbly cheese. Everything is cooked already, so you are mostly browning things and making the cheese sticky.

Feijoada

Brazilian style Feijoada can be made from canned black beans. First step is to drain the beans because the syrup that usually comes in the cans won't work.

The ingredients are pretty simple:
- 1/2 Yellow onion
- Green onion
- Garlic
- 2 cans Black Beans
- About 1/2 large Knorr chicken broth cube
- European style sliced bacon

Mise en Place

Dice the yellow onion. Cut the white end of green onion in 1/2 inch long pieces. Cut the green stems of the green onion into small round pieces for a garnish.

If you have time to roast the garlic, that will be best. Otherwise, diced garlic is ok. Worst case, dried garlic powder. Just a little.

Drain the beans and rinse.



The type of bacon is important, most of the flavor comes from the bacon. European style smoked bacon is about the best - it looks like thick slices of ham. It is already cooked, it just needs to be sliced into small squares or rectangles.

Procedure

Sweat the onions and garlic, add the bacon and cook a few minutes. Add the beans and cook to mix flavors.

Boil 1 cup water, dissolve the 1/2 Knorr cube, and pour this on the beans. Simmer about 20 minutes to mix the flavors and thicken slightly.



Done! Serve with Farofa

Salmon Baked Tortillas

(pictures coming soon)

Ingredients:
- Salmon, preferably with no skin
- Large flour tortillas

For a salsa:
- Cherry tomatoes
- oil
- fresh cilantro
- Balsamic vinegar

Optional sides:
- Avocado
- Sour cream

Browning the salmon:

The first step is to brown the salmon in a little oil. Cut the salmon into pieces that will fit inside a tortilla - it is easier to cut them before cooking.  Season the salmon first on both sides with salt and pepper to taste.

Use a non-stick pan, and heat a couple tablespoons of oil very hot.  Vegetable oil is best (corn, vegetable, safflower, etc., just not olive oil). Brown the salmon on both sides for a short time - about 1-2 minutes is enough. It should still be pink and raw in the center, and a little brown on the outside.

If the salmon has skin, there's not much you can do about it - you can brown the skin side a little. An option is to use salmon steaks (as opposed to filets), which have less skin on each piece.

Baking the tortilla:

Preheat the oven to 350.

Place each salmon fillets on a flour tortilla and fold gently. If you have a big enough flour tortilla, you can fold them like a burrito so that no moisture will escape while baking. If you want some fresh herbs, you can add cilantro on the salmon before folding.

Place the folded tortilla on a baking sheet (cover with aluminum foil to make it easier to clean!) and bake for about 20 minutes. IF you want the tortilla to be brown on the outside, you can brush some butter on it. It's not necessary though.

That's it, they are ready to eat in 20 mins.

To make a salsa:

Chop cherry tomatoes in half once. Toss in a bowl with a little oil and balsamic vinegar. Season with salt and pepper. Chop some fresh cilantro and toss on top.

Avocados & sour cream: you can dice the avocado and add to the salsa, OR you can just serve the avocado on the side. Sour cream makes a nice topping for the finished tortillas.

Why this recipe works:

This idea came from salmon baked in parchment, which is a typical fancy restaurant dish. The idea is that baking salmon in parchment keeps it moist. It is very common to brown meat or fish and then finish in an oven - this is the same principal. The tortilla keeps the salmon very soft and moist.

Some notes:

It's hard to find Salmon without skin, but if you do that's great. It is possible to cut the skin off with a VERY sharp knife, but it's probably not worth the hassle.

Oil: I recommend not using olive oil in this dish mostly because of the flavor. This is just my opinion. If want to try olive oil, go ahead and if you like it, that's fine.

Home Made Lemonade

Fresh lemonade is made from fresh squeezed lemons and simple syrup. It's important to use simple syrup and not just sugar. This is for a few reasons, one is that it just tastes better, but more importantly, simple syrup is boiled and is sterile. The lemonade will stay fresh longer.

You need:

- 1 cup lemon juice (about 5 lemons)
- 1 cup white sugar
- 1 1/2 cups water (for simple sugar)
- 6 cups water (for the lemonade)

First make a simple syrup. Simple syrup is made by boiling roughly equal parts water and white sugar. For this recipe, I used 1 1/2 cups of water and 1 cup of white sugar. Bring it to boil in a saucepan. It is done as soon as it boils. Let it cool, of course.

Squeeze the juice, about 5 lemons makes about 1 cup of lemon juice.

Now mix 1 cup of the simple syrup and 1 cup of lemon juice in a pitcher. This is now concentrated lemonade. It can be stored for a few days in the refrigerator or better yet frozen.

Take this base of juice and syrup and mix with about 6 cups of fresh water, or more or less to taste. Now you have fresh homemade lemonade!

Baby Back Ribs

Ingredients for the rub:
- 8 parts light brown sugar
- 1 parts kosher salt
- 1 part chili powder
- 1 part spice mix: black pepper, dried garlic, bay leaf, dried ancho chili, herb de provance, cayenne pepper, all ground in a mortar and pestle.

For two large racks of baby back ribs, 1/8 cup works out for the parts, e.g., 1 c brown sugar, 1/8c salt, 1/8c chili powder, 1/8c spice mix.




Ingredients for the bbq sauce:
- 1 cup white wine
- 1 tblsp white vinegar
- 2 tblsp worcestershire sauce
- 1tblsp honey
- 2 cloves crushed garlic
* Microwave this mixture for 1 minute to melt the honey

Make a kind of "boat" for the ribs with heavy duty foil. Shiny side out!

Lay them in and rub on both sides liberally with the rub. Meat side up (convex side up).

Close well, and let site AT LEAST 2 hours.

After the ribs marinate in the rub for at least 2 hours, open one end of the aluminum foil boat and pour in the bbq sauce. Bake in an over at 225 degrees for 2 1/2 hours. How do you know they're done? Grab a bone and try to turn it, if it breaks free easily, it is done!

Drain the bbq sauce into a clear dish and let the fat settle to the top for about 20 minutes. Skim off the fat and put the drippings in a sauce pan and reduce to a thick paste. Brush on the ribs, and then broil the ribs just a few minutes to caramelize the bbq sauce. 

Brush the bbq sauce on the ribs and broil a couple minutes - careful it will burn quickly.

Done!

If you want to see the origin for this recipe, it is from an Alton Brown video. Here he explains the entire technique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ2nL7VGOFs

Paella

The finished Paella looks awesome!

Probably the biggest challenge to make a good Paella is picking the right ingredients. It's probably one of the harder dishes to shop for. But once you figure out where to get the ingredients, Paella is both easy to make and amazingly delicious.

There are some tricks to picking easy ingredients, but when you find them, they make preparation very quick; for example, pre-sliced mushrooms, canned diced tomatos, and olive & garlic mix are pre prepared ingredients you can buy that shorten the cooking time dramatically. And Saffron. The liquid base is flavored throughout with Saffron.

Basically here are all the ingredients

There are only a few tricks to getting this dish right, but once you have it down, it is actually very easy and can have amazingly savory flavors.

Paella goes really well with any wine - it's not at all finicky. It is good with cabernets, pinot noirs, sangria, and champagne. It is also great with beer and a Caipirinha.

Ingredients:
- linguica, pre-cooked is preferable, about 4 inch piece
- olive oil
- diced tomatos (canned diced tomatoes or fresh)
- about 4-5 chicken thighs with the bone in, skinned
- mushrooms (pre-sliced or whole)
- Paella rice, about 1 1/4 cup
- 1 onion
- a few cloves of garlic chopped coarsely
- olives, garlic, pimento, caper mixture (also called alcaparrado, see notes on this below)
- shellfish; shrimp and/or mussels are nice, about 1/2 lb each
- chicken broth about 2 cups (or beef broth)
- anchovy
- cilantro
- saffron

Notes:
I'll write these notes first, because there are a few tricks to Paella. The right ingredients matter for this dish, and substitutions are not a good idea.
- Paella rice, do not substitute, it is an important ingredient. It is not too hard to find.
- Linguica can tricky. There are a lot of styles. Pre-cooked is preferred, and try to find one that is not too firm, not too soft. The important thing to remember is to buy one that you like, one that tastes fine all alone, and you'll be fine.

- You can find an olive mix in the deli section in jars, or make a mix yourself from the olive bars in a Safeway or Whole Foods. We made this mix ourselves by just going around the Whole Foods olive bar. It turned out awesome because we picked just the ingredients we

We made our own alcaparado from the
Whole Foods olive bar, it was delicious

- You can save a ton of time with canned or bottled ingredients. Diced tomatoes can be found in a can. Mushrooms are easy to find pre-slice now. All these little things can save a lot of time and make this dish more fun and easy.
- Shellfish can be mixed any way you like. Get 2 or 3 that you like. We usually use shrimp and mussels. Clams are fine. So are squid or scallops.
- The main trick in the technique is getting everything done at the same time; the chicken, the rice, the shellfish.
- The only cooking trick is that it is very easy to burn the bottom of the rice, so you have to be careful with the right heat.


Procedure:

Cooking the chicken and linguica

- This recipe goes fast, so it is very important to prep everything first; slice onion and garlic, skin off the chicken, slice linguica, peel shrimp, etc, etc
- Heat the broth to boiling in a separate pan
- In olive oil, brown the chicken thighs and slices of linguica
- After chicken is browned on both sides, toss in onions, garlic and mushrooms, cook a couple minutes
- Toss in paella rice, coat with oil and fat
- Toss in diced tomatoes, olive mixture
- Toss in a few crushed anchovies, you won't actually taste the anchovy, but they will impart a savory flavor to the dish.
- Add in hot broth
- Sprinkle saffron on top, it needs to infuse the broth

Adding the mushrooms and onion

- Turn the heat pretty far down - Cover and simmer 15-20 minutes. This is a tricky heat level, the broth needs to boil, but since you cannot stir the dish at this point, it is easy to burn the rice in the bottom of the pan, so get the heat as low as you can while still boiling gently.

Just added the broth and starting the simmer

- The rice should be near done in 15-20 minutes, put the shellfish in a layer on top, and toss on some cilantro (as much as you like)
- Cover and cook the whole thing another 5 minutes until the mussels open and/or the shrimp are done

Pao de Queijo

Finished Pao de Queijo & Caipirinha's

Ingredients:
-2 cups tapioca flour

-1 cup whole milk
-1/2 cup butter (or margarine)
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 cups grated Parmesan cheese
- 2 eggs

Put the dough in muffin tins

Pao de Queijo dough

 Procedure:
 1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
2. In the mean time bring the milk, salt, and butter to a boil in a sauce pan while constantly stirring mixture.
 3. Once boiling remove the mixture of milk, salt and butter from heat.
4. Slowly add tapioca flour, stirring constantly until thoroughly mixed
5. Add the cheese and eggs to mixture
6. Mix until smooth
7. Fill each mini muffin cup all the way up
8. Bake until golden brown, usually about 15 minutes.
You can eat them while hot, they are delicious when fresh! Cooked puffs can be stored, in the fridge as long as it's kept covered and then warmed up on a low setting in a toaster oven.