Mac Attack

With more time on my hands (but it dwindling quickly, since I will be one of the lonely souls bumping around the office hallways this week) I tried a classic comfort food for the holidays: homemade mac and cheese.

Martha Stewart's *PERFECT* Mac and Cheese, even.

It was pretty darn near perfect, even for a novice try. Gooey, cheesy, with a hint of nutmeg and cayenne pepper.
Martha, being smarter than you or I, offers a lesson with her recipe:

"If you have ever managed to have a lucid thought while eating this gooey, delicious dish, it may have been to wonder how macaroni and cheese -- American cheese melted into a traditional British white sauce served over Italian pasta -- came about. It all started during the age of European colonization, when seafaring men transported dried macarone -- one of the few staples that could survive a year aboard ship -- from Italy to Britain and to the American colonies.

American colonists did not have the selection of fresh produce and other ingredients that the Italians had; their meals were improvised from a larder of fresh or sour milk, stale bread, and pork drippings. So the imported pasta would often be served with a simple white sauce -- milk thickened with flour and butter. Sometimes it was baked in a casserole with buttered breadcrumbs on top. A recipe for a casserole of macaroni, white sauce, and grated yellow cheese was first recorded in the "Boston Cooking School Cookbook" in 1896."

Those colonists got it right. YUM.

However, with..
1) all this cheesy goodness
2) enough to serve twelve (why don't I remember to halve or quarter recipes??!)
3) a White Christmas outside, and
4) a hurt knee from too much zeal on the treadmill earlier this week

...I fear that we'll have to blow the dust off The Plan from earlier this year.

I've been eating mac and cheese like a rhinoceros. How does a rhino eat mac and cheese? Like it's going out of style, like there's nothing better in the world, like a maniac. YUM. YUM. YUM.