Gouda Macaroni And Cheese

I have a lot of recipes that have been sitting in my "drafts" folder for over a year now, which I'm hoping to clear out in the coming months.
This is a recipe I first tried out last winter inspired by what I saw here. 

Ingredients:
1 cup pasta (pipette/elbow macaroni)
1 Tbsp butter
½ onion, chopped finely (optional- I only used this since I had a small piece in the refrigerator)
2-3 cloves garlic, crushed and chopped up
Red pepper flakes
Salt
Pepper
2 Tbsp all-purpose flour
1 ½ cups milk (I only buy 2%, so that's what I used)
A sprig of fresh rosemary, chopped
1 cup Gouda cheese, freshly grated (I used this)
½ - ¾ cup breadcrumbs

Method:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line an 8 x 8-inch baking dish with foil and grease with oil/butter.

I had a lot of stale Italian bread and decided turn some of it into bread crumbs. For this, just place bread in a food processor, and pulse a couple of times to get coarse crumbs.

Bring a saucepan of salted water to a boil and cook pasta until al dente. Drain off excess water and rinse under cold water.

Meanwhile, melt butter in another pan over medium heat. Add garlic, chopped onions, red pepper flakes, salt and pepper. Cook till onions soften.

Add the flour and cook till its raw smell disappears. Gradually add milk, chopped rosemary, some more salt and pepper, stirring constantly until blended. Cook on medium heat for a while until the roux thickens Add cheese; stir until melted.

Add cooked macaroni to the cheese sauce, stirring until well blended. Pour the mixture into the baking dish. Top with breadcrumbs. Bake at 350° F for 12-15 minutes or until bubbly. Serve hot.

Cheese Crackers

A stack of crackers

I’ve been wanting to try my hand at crackers for a while now and I finally got around to making some yesterday. I had some Gouda cheese left over from a recipe that I’d tried a few days back. I decided to make some cheese crackers. All I needed was a good recipe. As always, I turned to the Internet for help and was inspired by what I saw in a couple of places.

Ingredients:
(For 20 small and 10 medium crackers)
2 tightly packed cups of freshly grated Gouda cheese (I used this)
1 cup all-purpose flour
3 Tbsp unsalted butter (cold), cut up into small pieces
Salt
Pepper
Approximately 3 Tbsp cold buttermilk

Method:
Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with foil. (I started out using parchment paper for baking the crackers, but halfway through the process, it started to smell like something was starting to burn inside the oven, so I replaced the parchment paper with aluminium foil. I don’t know if the parchment paper that I used was of poor quality.)

Put flour, salt, pepper, shredded cheese and butter in bowl of a food processor. Pulse until flour, butter, and cheese are combined. Add buttermilk and continue to pulse, scraping down the sides of the bowl. Keep adding buttermilk, 1 teaspoon at a time, until the mixture comes together to form a dough.

Divide the dough into as many balls as you want to make crackers (many small ones or a few bigger ones), place on a foil-lined baking sheet and bake till golden brown.

I was making the crackers in 2 batches, so I divided the dough into 2 portions: I used one portion to make small crackers (I got 20 crackers from this) and the other to make bigger, slightly chewier ones (the yield here was 10 crackers).

For the first batch, I rolled out the dough between sheets of parchment paper and then poked the surface several times with a fork. I then used a drinking glass with a small diameter (since I do not have cookie cutters) to make about two dozen small discs.
For the second batch of crackers, I made small 1-inch balls of the dough, placed them on parchment paper, and then flattened the balls with my hand (you could use the bottom of a drinking glass instead to get uniform thickness). I then pricked each circle several times with a fork.

Bake at 350 degrees F for 12-20 minutes (depending on size and thickness of cracker) until very lightly browned around the edges. Remove to a wire rack and cool.



Cheese crackers for My Favorite Things: Cheese.