Grown-up macaroni and cheese

As promised, Sawa decided to attempt to make mac n' cheese from scratch after our mac-n'-cheese-in-a-box last week. The recipe is on p. 93 of Anne Willan's "The Good Cook", which as I've noted previously, is one of our major sources of inspiration for recipes and general cooking concepts.

Basically, the main difference between this and the boxed kind that we made last week is that you make the cheese sauce yourself, whisking together flour, butter, milk, grated cheddar cheese and nutmeg on the stove. Also, rather than just pouring it over the boiled macaroni, you bake the whole thing in a casserole dish for half an hour.

It's hard to say exactly how we feel about the finished product. True, it was very tasty, but it was almost nothing like the nostalgic mac n' cheese of our youth, either in taste or in ease of preparation. If you think of it as a completely un-related food group, it'll probably be less jarring.

Here are some action shots of the cooking process:

The ingredients

Sauteing the onions and sausage

Whisking the cheese sauce