Bread, Butter, and Cheese

Los Angeles, California

Now that I've had my rant about non-adventurous eaters, and I've gotten it out of my system, I'm ready to settle down and write about the food that really means something in my life. And that's not lobster, nor caviar, nor even the much-heralded Kaya Toast. Truth be known, the food that, all things (including fat, calories, and other health considerations) aside, I tend to crave the most is (surprise!) bread, butter, and cheese.

A few years back I surprised Billy with reservations to celebrate his birthday at The French Laundry. We had an amazing evening there, just the two of us. And I remember several of the iconic dishes we ate there, but what I remember the most was how good the butter tasted! I know, I know. Go figure. Cleverly, no bread was brought to the table when we were first seated. But somewhere in the middle of the early courses, a server brought a tray around, and offered us a choice of several varieties of bread. He or she (can't recall, there were so many of them gliding about) placed two dishes of butter on the table. One was from Vermont, and the other was local from Sonoma County. The bread was good, but what we spread on it was unrecognizable. Why is this so good? I asked Billy. It wasn't that we hadn't had butter in so long that we didn't recognize it. We don't eat much butter at home, but we eat a little, as we never use a butter substitute. But, we get around butter by using olive oil for cooking most of the time, and not spreading butter on much of anything. After that evening, I experimented with some of the imported butters like Plugra European and Kerrygold Irish, but even those tasted nothing like what we had marveled over at The French Laundry. Was it because it was so fresh? Did they milk the cow at midnight and make the butter at dawn that day? That might have worked for Sonoma, but what about the Vermont butter?

Anyway (before the entire post becomes about butter), I think I have written before that my friend, Lisa, says that she would rather have bread and butter than dessert these days. I whole-heartedly agree with this. Give me a hot, crisp loaf of sourdough bread. Or, toasted brioche. Or, really good chewy rye bread. Pass me some good enough sweet butter (as I've given up the quest of finding butter as good as I had on that fateful night), and I am one happy camper.

What completes the triumvirate here is (surprise!) cheese. Yep. Good, old-fashioned cheese. And I mean that with no trace of irony. I LOVE sharp Cheddar cheese. I love Manchego, and also Leyden (which has cumin seeds, and is, I believe, a dutch Edam-style cheese). And, I also love Camembert, which is really getting into Haagen Dazs territory when you start calculating butter fat. And I mean that in a good way.

Remember the we're good 95% of the time so that we can be really bad 5% of the time? Well, this is one of those times. Sometimes you just want, you just need, you just must have bread, butter, and cheese. That is why I revisited Cheese Fondue recently. I had to dig out, and dust off, the fondue pot in order to do this. And my recipe made an inordinate amount of fondue, way more than Billy and I could consume even in our 5% mode. But what we had was delicious, though I probably won't prepare it again for many, many moons, and then some.

What I am inclined to prepare more often when I am in this mood, is my recipe for macaroni and cheese. I've been preparing this dish since I was a child. The recipe originally came from my Betty Crocker Boys and Girls Cookbook, which I got when I was in elementary school, skipping right over the Easy Bake Oven phase, where you bake utilizing a lightbulb because ostensibly you shouldn't be trusted yet with a real oven, give me a break. The recipe was added to and subtracted from, and over time, leaned down a bit, though, let's face it, macaroni and cheese is never going to be a svelte dish, at least not palatably. Somewhere along the line I recognized the same basic recipe in The Los Angeles Times. It was attributed to Ronald Reagan (as in macaroni & cheese from the great communicator). Trust me, this can be made in a blue state home, just as easily.

Macaroni & Cheese

10 ounces              medium shell, or gnocchi-shaped pasta

2                              eggs, beaten with
1/2 teaspoon         salt or Lawry's seasoned salt (sorry!) and
couple of grinds  mixed peppercorns

1/2 cup                    sour cream or light (not non-fat) sour cream,
                                 blended with:
1 1/4 cup                 whole or low-fat (not non-fat) milk; and
10 or so shakes     hot sauce (I like Crystal brand Louisiana hot
                                  sauce, but any medium-heat brand will do.
                                  I wouldn't use that much Tabasco!)

2 cups                      cheese*, cut into 3/4 inch cubes
1/2 cup                    cheese*, shredded on large-holed side of grater
2 tablespoons        butter, cut into dice-sized cubes (optional)

1/2 cup                    breadcrumbs, matzo meal, panko or
                                  combination of any, browned up in a small
                                  skillet with tablespoon or two of melted butter
                                  and/or olive oil.


Cook pasta, drain and return to hot kettle. Immediately toss with the beaten egg mixture. Then stir in the cubed cheese, and butter, if you are using butter. Place in buttered casserole. Pour sour cream/milk mixture over. Top with shredded cheese and crumbs.

Bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes.

*about that cheese . . . I almost always use a sharp cheddar for at least some portion of this, and usually for the shredded cheese topping. The cheddar mixes well with the aforementioned Leyden, if you can find it (our local Whole Foods carries it). I've also used a small amount of stilton with the cheddar. If you'd like to use Monterey Jack or swiss for a portion of the cheese, you might stir in some green chilies. Recently, I made this with baby swiss and gruyere, and stirred in a couple of spoonfuls of Carmelized Onions, the recipe for which you can find in a previous post entitled Come Sunday (available here, for free!). That was quite tasty.

Note that this does not make a cheese-sauce style dish. It is custard-based, more like what you find as the filling in quiche. The cheese melts but doesn't meld into the custard. So you get melty nuggets of cheese along with the custard and the pasta. What is lovely about these suggested choices in pasta is that the nuggets of cheese can get wedged inside the cavities of the pasta. Isn't that fun -- kinda like putting ripe olives on your fingers?! But you could use any macaroni-style pasta. There's a lot of freedom here.  The only thing I would advise against is using a reduced-fat cheese. They just don't have the right consistency in their melted stage, and frankly aren't that good in any stage. If you feel you need to reduce the fat by, say 25%, I'd suggest eating this 25% less often. But that's just the way my mind works.


So feel free to use your favorite pasta; your favorite cheese. Skip the butter if you're feeling pious (I usually do). Make your own breadcrumbs, or not. The obvious point being that you can fool around with this recipe in any way that you might like. Betty Crocker won't mind. I won't mind. And, I think I can assure you that neither will Ronald Reagan. Thanks for reading my blog. Sorry if it was a bit cheesy . . .