Wanna S'Mac?

Cooking for kids can be tough, especially when you consider yourself a bit of a foodie and you want to pizazz up your food. In your head you think you'll make a dish so well for a kid that they will have an "aha" moment and the clouds will part and they truly understand what good food tastes like. That usually doesn't happen. They usually taste whatever it is you made and prefer the version that came out of the box and tastes like cardboard. Funny how that works.

My nephews are big on Mac N' Cheese and it would always be a treat to make it for them around the holidays. My brother hates most dairy products so his household is void of dairy for most of the year. Well its a treat for me to cook for my nephews and my brother's family and it's usually a treat for them to have something drowned in cheese. I tend to make the mistake of making it too fancy and kids tend to get a bit bummed when it doesn't taste like Velveeta, butter, and pasta. Well this year for Changsgiving I decided to shop out my dish and leave it up to a recipe. It had to be simple, kid friendly and something close to Mac N' Cheese.

After picking up a new BBQ cookbook from one of our Favorite BBQ joints in the city "Dinosaur's BBQ" I was eager to try  something out of their cookbook. Surely they had to have Mac N' Cheese as a desirable BBQ side dish. Sure enough page 48 "Dinosaur Style Macaroni and Cheese Shepard's Pie", perfect!

Software:
3 Tablespoons of Kosher Salt
1 Pound of Small Pasta Shells
1 Tablespoons of Vegetable oil
2 Cups of Chopped Onion
1 Cup of Chopped Green Bell Pepper
5 Large Garlic Cloves Chopped
1  1/4 Pounds of Ground Beef
1 Tablespoon of freshly ground Pepper
1 Tablespoon of BBQ Sauce
1/4 Cup of Unsalted Butter
1/4 Cup of AP flour
1 1/2 Cups of Half and Half
3 Cups of Shredded Sharp Cheddar
1 Cup of grated Parm Cheese
2 Teaspoons of Dijon Mustard
Tabasco Sauce Optional.

Hardware:
Pot to boil past
Strainer
High walled skilled or Dutch Oven
Your favorite knife. *Today I whipped out the Kyocera Ceramic
Chopping block
Spatula
9 by 13 baking dish

First you want to get your oven going at 375 Degrees Fahrenheit. Preheat the oven as you start to prep and assemble your mise en place.

Start a full pot of boiling salted and lubed (oil) water for the pasta.

In the skillet add your oil, half the onions and half the peppers. Just saute them lightly you don't want them to take on any color so medium heat please. 

Add the garlic once the onions start to look translucent. Down in Cajun country they would call this trio the Holy Trinity and its used as a base for anything from Jambalaya to Red Beans and Rice. The french would have their take and call it mirepoix and the Spanish would call it Sofrito. Basically they are all an onion mixture with two or more vegetables or herbs that would be used as a flavor base for most of their dishes.

Continue to cook the garlic, onion, pepper mixture for about another minute.

Add the ground beef and SnP. Sautee until the mixture looks like a dark brown and the pan caramelize bits of the beef fat. Add the BBQ sauce, scrape up the caramelized goodness on bottom, and set aside to cool.

This is good time to add the pasta to the boiling water.

Clean out your skillet and melt the butter on a medium flame. Add the rest of the onions and peppers and sautee until translucent like before. Now add the flour and continually scrape the bottom of the skillet. This is called a roux and is also widely used in southern cooking. Roux's are generally a fat (butter, Lard, oil) and flour cooked into a paste of varying degrees of brown. Roux's are also the first step to a Bechamel sauce which is one of the master sauces in the cooking world. With a Bechamel you can create anything from an Alfredo sauce to a New England Clam Chowder.

This is a good time to drain your pasta. Make sure your pasta is a good young al dente remember it will continue to cook when you bake it.

As the roux goods you need to continually scrape it and DO NOT leave your pan. It burns easily and once it burns there's no recovery other than starting scratch. Take the half and half and nuke it up or warm it up in a pot while your scraping and whisking. Now add your cream slowly and you will see the roux incorporate into it making a nice cream base for your cheese sauce.

Once fully incorporated add half of your Cheddar and all of your parm. SnP to your liking and add the cooked pasta.

Now get out a 9 by 13 casserole dish and add the beef mixture first then the pasta with sauce on top. Finally top with the remaining Cheddar and place in the oven for 30 minutes until its bubbling and delicious.

The irony is that for Changsgiving the kids didn't like it up much and we ended up taking it up and ate it for the next few days. Although I thought the kids would love it and the adults the opposite I was dead wrong. The kids didn't care for it but the adults liked it. Eh what can you do? I'll get them next year!