Three (or Four) Cheese Mac and Cheese with Herbs

Coming home from producing our show’s Cinco de Mayo episode, I decided to celebrate all things queso!

There’s some serious cheese going on here, folks.  You need to be warned… I mean truly warned.  Take a good look at the photo below and ask yourself, “Do I have the fortitude to take on this recipe?”  All of the cheese in the photo below was grated  and melted into a mere 12 ounces of penne rigate to create the finished product.  You’ve been told.
And it doesn’t stop there.  There’s also butter!  There’s also bacon!  There’s also the fat from the bacon! There’s also white flour.  There’s also fresh sage, parsley, oregano and rosemary.  Some of that counts as vegetables, right?

Am I leaving anything out.  Oh yeah!  I accidentally doubled the amount of butter required by the recipe.  Oops!  I swear, it was unintentional.  And guess what, it totally didn’t ruin the meal!  Who’d have thought it?

I started preparing this at about 8:00 in the evening.  I started eating it at about 9.  By about 10, I was speaking in tongues and levitating three feet off the floor

The recipe can be found at StephenCooks.com, so send your thank you cards and/or the pants you are about to no longer be able to fit into his direction, not mine.  I didn’t come up with this.  I merely used it on a lonely Wednesday night to fill a hole in my heart.  Cheese is really the best way to overcome such things, don’t you think?

So take a read below for how to get ‘er done, and then head to the store for the ingredients you’re missing, because if you have this much cheese just sitting around your house already, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be spending your time reading blog posts.

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Farfalle with Sage, Peas and Bacon

MG is sick and I’m depressed about it. I know I’m depressed because I’m exhibiting my #1 symptom… I become super-productive on the weekends.

This is an improvement over what I did in my twenties when I was depressed, which was smoke grass, drink martinis and watch television until I either fell asleep or threw up.

Ah, the glamour of the twenties!

So I don’t plan too many structured events on the weekends anymore because they’ve become mostly about me and MG making fattening breakfasts, having coffee at The Big Fixx on Sunset (formerly Abbot’s Habit), watching television together and seeing who can win in the categories of “Snarkiest Comment,” “Best Impression of a Loser Celebrity.” and “Most Accurate Representation of What the Cat in the Cat Food Commercial would Sound Like if It Could Speak Human.”

Then we separate for a few hours in the middle of the day so he can get some work done, I’ll get together everything I need to make the night’s dinner, and we reconvene for more television, snarky comments and cocktails.

But none of that happened this past weekend, and by noon on Saturday I’d done all my grocery shopping, all my laundry, hit the post office and the dry cleaner, worked out, erased said workout by stopping at Carl’s Jr., tried to get my cat to eat a french fry and took a nap.

I had absolutely nothing else on my “to do” list for the entire weekend, so of course I spent it in the kitchen, making this meal, along with some other goodies that are being banked away for later postings. But MG wasn’t there to admire my kitchen technique, or rave about the finished meal after snaring his usual lion-sized portion, so it wasn’t nearly as gratifying and I have WAY TOO MUCH left over.

With each passing kitchen attempt I’m becoming more and more fascinated with perfecting the process than I am with actually feasting on the finished result. I’d much prefer to give the food itself over to someone else for them to enjoy, and just stay in the kitchen and tackle the next recipe on my long long list. Anyone else feel that way?

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