by Marlena Elias
August 3, 2002
I want the entire world to know (more like the 15 people who come to our site), that I love my husband. There are many reasons why I love him, but one very endearing reason is his need to make dinner. Since we both work, he knows that I get tired of cooking every night and feels it's only fair that he contributes to this nightly chore. Because I know my husband loves me, I must tell this story. It's a very emotional, beautiful story about a special night when Ethan made Macaroni and Cheese - from scratch.
Ethan had been watching FOOD TV, which is a cable network dedicated to the art of cooking. So lately Ethan has taken to printing off the recipes he sees on this network and trying to decipher the code. One program really caught his attention and as he watched the chef make Mac & Cheese, he thought to himself, "I surely can make Mac & Cheese!" So with grit and determination, Eth went to the Kroger and purchased the ingredients for this very special recipe.
Ethan has always fantasized about cooking gourmet food. In the early days of our dating he wanted to prepare these complicated/sophisticated meals. I always found his desire to cook an endearing trait, which was, until I tasted the finished product. My first clue about his ability in the kitchen was his natural affinity for frozen Chicken Cordon Bleu, Pringles, and Old El Paso Salsa and the medium sized Tostitos. Truly this should have been my first clue that Eth had never done more than microwave or when the occasion called for it, turn ON the oven to heat a frozen pizza. His kitchen was stocked for a bachelor. As I also learned early in our relationship, his true calling was in the bedroom, not the kitchen.
So my darling husband made a few attempts to cook once we had moved into the house in Plano, Texas. Many an innocent meal was reduced to an inedible heap. Eth would spend hours preparing these complicated dishes that even a seasoned veteran in the kitchen would not attempt. Despite the early setback, he never lost the desire to help with the cooking.
In the pile of junk mail that I got at work was a membership to the Cooking Club of America. It was cheap and offered some great free crap so I signed up for the subscription. About a month after the magazine started showing up, I received a cookbook. It was a very basic cookbook with pictures that show you every step of the cooking process. As I was looking through the cookbook, the thought occurs to me that Ethan might really benefit from this book! So I took the book home and my darling husband devoured all the recipes in the cookbook!
Ethan had found a bolognese recipe that he was able to follow and bless his heart, he made one of the most delicious meals I have ever tasted. He finely chopped all the vegetables and garlic, sautéed these ingredients and browned the meat, and then he added some chunky tomatoes and tomato paste, and some red wine. The sauce was heavenly. I couldn't stop making "yummy noises" - this stuff was "the bomb"! Truly this recipe is one of my favorite dishes.
So Ethan was fresh from this culinary victory when he saw this television show host prepare Mac & Cheese. Ethan felt that compared to the complicated Bolognese sauce, Mac & Cheese was elementary! Well, my darling husband was in for a rather rude awakening.
As I sat in our family room and smelled the burned roux (a roux is melted butter mixed with flour to create the base for a cheese sauce) I offered my assistance. "No, no, no - I have this under control," and then I heard Ethan mutter something under his breath which sounded like "if I only would have measured all the ingredients out before I started cooking this would be SO much easier."
While Eth was making the roux, he was simultaneously boiling the Macaroni noodles. He was muttering some more about, "how long do I cook the noodles?" So the noodles have been boiling in the water for 10 minutes or so and Eth is adding the milk to the flour/butter mixture. Then he added the rest of the ingredients, which he swore up and down, made the Mac & Cheese on TV look "butt kicking". One of the secret ingredients was an egg, which we all know I hate, but I was not going to ruin this culinary experiment for Ethan by saying how disgusting I thought adding an egg to the sauce would be. So, there was a special technique needed to add the cold egg to the hot sauce and I have no idea if this worked or not at this point, because Ethan is really muttering to himself. He adds the cheese to this interesting mix on the stove and right about now, decided he should drain his Macaroni, which has been cooking for 33 minutes.
So he drains the pasta, the puts it into the casserole dish, pours the cheese sauce on the Mac, tops the pasta with extra cheese and bread crumbs, then puts this dish into the oven for 20 minutes. He pulls the dish out of the oven, and I come up to where the dish is resting, and I can feel from the bottom of my toes a laugh that could very well end my marriage. The pan on the stove is filled with what I can only describe as vomit with noodles. It resembled the sawdust stuff the janitor would use in grade school whenever someone puked. Somehow in the cooking process the milk never turned the roux mixture into a sauce, so instead of a creamy cheese sauce, it was mass of dark brown particulate matter mixed with over-cooked noodles that had a very gum-like consistency. I am trying with all my heart to not bust out laughing, but the first spoon full of this "food" onto the dish has me gasping for air because I can't stop laughing. My husband quietly leaves the kitchen and goes into the family room to wait for my hysteria to stop. I realize that if I don't stop laughing I will permanently injure my husband's ego and that is really the last thing I want to do. I just can't comprehend what had gone so terribly wrong in the cooking process to create what was really an amazing pile of crap.
So in my effort to appease my husband, I dish up two plates of this food and we try to eat it. It was awful. I tried like hell to eat more than 3 noodles, but I couldn't bring myself to eating the brown particulate goop that was taking up the rest of my plate. So mercifully, we both agreed that the recipe didn't quite work and I took his plate and quickly disposed of any evidence of this dish. I washed the pots and pans and dishes and measuring cups and measuring spoons, so that there was no visible sign of this culinary attempt that went amok. The only evidence was the lingering smell of the burnt roux.
Being the noble soul that Ethan is, he would not let this meagerly recipe undo his success with the Bolognese sauce. He was bound and determined to slay the dragon, so to speak. So recently my darling husband SUCCESSFULLY made a different recipe for Macaroni and Cheese. It was a smashing success and I must say, he learned many important cooking tips and techniques due to the earlier fiasco. I give him huge amounts of credit for getting back up on that cooking horse and slaying his nemesis.
As I said before, I love my husband. Now his true calling is in the kitchen as well as the bedroom! <EM>
(Note: The offending recipe was courtesy Alton Brown, who is forever banned from this household. The correct recipe was provided by Tyler Florence, who is held in the highest esteem.)
