Recipe for comfort in quarantine, Macaroni Cheese soufflé.

For the recipe without my unnecessary ramblings, please just head to the recipe section. The idea of me writing a blog, like everybody with a passion to share and a need to nurture, is to try and infect others with this passion. Very often amongst those who do not cook, there is almost a palpable self justification in their excuses, “Oh, cooking is not for me, I do not like it” or simply ‘”I have no patience for it”. I am not sure whether it is a question of giving up when several attempts have been made cooking something which required a bit more skills than what we actually possess. Even those who are good cooks almost always bite a bit more than they actually can and this this constant physical effort at cooking becomes a barrier to cooking with ease. Ask anybody who loves their food, everybody cooking is almost always simple but ever so often I’ll make up this 3 course dinner, or even 5 course dinner, but then skills build up slowly with practice, everyday, constant. It is a language, you need to keep using it. First you use “oh hello, my name is…” then “I would like one large beer please” progressing to writing essays in said language. I also often compare it to running. One does not jump into 5k runs, you start with small minute chunks. When I first met my husband, he invited me to dinner. We were both in rudimentary student accommodation at the time and being ‘invited’ to dinner rather than a house party or drinks at the pub sounded like quite a fancy affair. I was clearly looking forward to this not least because of his athletic good looks but also being one of the few of my friends who cooked, I looked forward to being cooked for.

When I arrived I clinched on very quickly what it would be like to date an athlete. He did 1500 and 5k at the time. I got offered water…or water. I took the water. However the banter was good and he made me laugh. I was starving so very much looking forward to the next phase, the actual food. I watched incredulously as he boiled the spaghetti with a handful of frozen vegetable and unscrewed a jar of Dolmio. Et voilà, dinner was presented. I still ate, I was a student so when I had to eat, I always ate what there was. This was the first of many anecdotes over food with my then boyfriend. Point is, over the years, he understood the passion, enjoyed the results of it and slowly, he also got stunningly good at cooking. As for me, I went from being a ‘non runner’s as in “I cant run, I have this crooked bone in my left leg…” to now running a very comfortable 5k.

This recipe I’m first introducing to you is in theory simple. The base of this is a béchamel sauce, the recipe for which is in the ‘elementary’ section of the blog. The classic béchamel sauce is made using seasoned milk with equal amounts of butter to flour. Flour is a thickened very often used in many sauces and it is very difficult to go wrong with this unless you decide to not stir. A sister-in-law of mine showed me how to do this one day without measurements, certainly though over an open recipe book. It was the first time she was cooking for me and unbeknown to me, cooking was not her forte. Her recipe that day was béchamel over a baked marrow stuffed with mince. She could have been an accomplished cook for all I know, I was a willing student that day as everything tasted so good, if it was not for my cousin’s face. He looked stunned, and for that matter, so did she. After this, I made béchamel for everything I could add it to, from pasta, fish to simply have on bread. I still love it.