Mac and Cheese

Ok, first real post:

Tonight I made a baked macaroni and cheese casserole, following the Alton Brown recipe, found here. It's pretty simple and straightforward really, but you still need to be careful.

In the end though, it turned out pretty well:

Kinda yells, "Comfort food is here! Consume!" don't you think? Or maybe I'm the only one who carries on whole conversations with the food I'm preparing....

Let's back up a bit for a moment.

It's always a good idea to follow a recipe as written the first time through, just to get a feel for it. You need that baseline for comparison. Otherwise, if something goes better or worse than you thought, you won't know if it was something you did, or else something wrong with the initial procedure. I've made this a few times before, so I normally like to play with it a little. But I wanted to refresh my knowledge of the dish, so I decided to follow along a little more closely. Oh, except I doubled it, because I live with two other guys, and we're hungry, dammit!

It all starts with the initial ingredients:

That's the milk, noodles, eggs and shredded sharp cheddar in the back row, with the chopped onion up front and the mixture of flour, paprika, dry mustard and bay leaves in the small bowl in the middle.

OK, wait, so I lied a little: I didn't follow the recipe exactly as written. But I didn't add any bacon or anything this time so it still counts, right? (No, I have not taken leave of my senses in omitting the bacon; I'll do it next time, I promise.) I was short on dry mustard, so I upped the paprika and added some honey dijon from the fridge. I also like to sweat the onions with the butter before adding the dry goods. I think it works better.

Speaking of better, I think the recipe definitely needs more than just sharp cheddar. In the past, I've used a combination of cheeses, and I think it gave it a more complex, cheesy flavor. (I think I used some Gouda last time.) Now I just need to find the best combination and report back on it.

The only real mishap? I managed to scald the milk a little bit, which is a pain to clean up after. I had to let the pot soak, and my roommate scrubbed the hell out of it about three hours later. Other than that though, I think it all came together fairly well. Check out the "before" shot:

Something else to point out: I did not double the topping. I tried doing that once, and it really didn't brown very well. And GBD (Golden, Brown, and Delicious... it's a technical term, honest) is the goal. And I think I hit it pretty well: