Quick Tomato Macaroni Cheese

From Jamie’s Dinners, Jamie Oliver, Penguin Books, 2006.

I was having the family for dinner and some of the younger members are a little particular about what they eat. So I decided that perhaps a macaroni cheese might do the trick. I decided to try out this one by Jamie Oliver. It had tomatoes in it that I thought might not be quite right for those I was making it for so decided to cut back on that ingredient.

It was all very easy to make. The macaroni had to be put on to cook and while that was happening the sauce had to be made.

The sauce was made by adding the ingredients to the food processor and blending them until they were smooth. I only added two tomatoes rather than the quantity suggested, along with a garlic clove, some fresh basil, and a few chopped sun-dried tomatoes. I did not put in the anchovies. When it was blended I tasted it and added salt, quite necessary, and a couple of grindings of black pepper.

Next were added grated Parmesan cheese, fresh cream, a little red wine vinegar and a pinch of grated nutmeg. It was given another burst in the blender and it was ready.

The macaroni was now also ready so it was placed in a casserole and the sauce poured over it. I added a little of the cooking water as it seemed to need a little more liquid. Over the top of this went pieces of mozzarella, a little more Parmesan and breadcrumbs. A drizzle of olive oil went over the top and it went into the oven.

At the same time as I was making the casserole I put macaroni cheese into two individual casseroles for the family members coming the next day.

I was happy with this macaroni cheese. It was gooey, tasty and filling. Next time I make it I would like to try it with the full amount of tomatoes. As it was it had plenty of flavour but it could have done with more cheese in the sauce. This would have been made up for by the extra tomatoes that I didn’t include.

Taste: ✔✔✔✔

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔✔

Grown-up Mac and Five Cheese

Grown-up Mac and Five Cheese

from Vegetarian, Pippa Cuthbert & Lindsay Cameron Wilson, New Holland Publishers, 2010.

You always want a cookbook to give you confidence to go ahead and make a recipe from it, with some sort of assurance that what you make will be close to what you have chosen to make. After I had purchased this book I browsed through it to look at what it contained and my confidence dropped considerably. I was looking at a recipe for Mushroom & Tarragon Wellington and noticed that there were oddly no mushrooms in the list of ingredients. A closer look showed that this was not the recipe that headed the page at all. From the ingredient list I could see that it was items that would make some sort of pasta with broccoli. It did not take too long to find the same recipe under the heading Broccoli, Chilli & Almond Penne. Not a good start. Looks like a poor bit of editing.

Naturally I began to look a little closer—not too much closer—and began to find that this was not the only problem. For example, in one recipe I noticed there is a subheading ‘For the tomato sauce’ in the list of ingredients but you never see where the sauce ingredients end and the other ingredients begin. It looks as though the whole recipe is just the tomato sauce. More editing blunders.

I’d spent my good money purchasing the book so I was determined that I’d give it a go despite the feeling that it might just be better to forget it. So I chose the first recipe in the book, a macaroni cheese. Surely you couldn’t go wrong with that old family favourite. How wrong could I be.

The ingredients list mentions Worcestershire sauce. This is a vegetarian cookbook. Don’t they know that Worcestershire sauce has anchovies in it?

Also the ingredient list says two teaspoons of salt. The first mention of salt in the recipe itself says to add one tablespoon of salt. Later on it actual says to add the remaining salt. I presume that the ingredients list should have been tablespoons, but even if this is the case there is no way I would add one tablespoon of salt to the macaroni cheese with all the salty cheese mixes already in it.  Proofreading failure?

Anyway, not to be beaten by a poorly edited book I went ahead with the macaroni cheese, but making substitutions along the way. It turned out to be quite a reasonable dish. I’m not that convinced that all of the different cheeses make that much difference to the flavour. It was a little stronger than you usually find but that doesn’t really make up for the difference in cost to what is basically a family meal. I usually toss in all the bits of cheese left in the fridge and add some Dijon mustard to the mix to add some bite. I did like the addition of sundried tomatoes. They worked well.

Whether I’ll go ahead with making other items from the book remains to be seen. For the moment I’ll put it aside; there’s plenty of other recipe books.

When you find so many errors from a brief look you feel sure that there are going to be more. It all seems a pity because one of the authors is a food journalist and the other a food writer and stylist. To have such an apparently careless piece of publishing attributed to them is not good. My impression is that New Holland Publishers have an editor who is not a cook, or possibly a poor proofreader.

Taste: ✔✔✔

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔