Tonight is the second one-dish dinner. The menu is chili mac, vegetarian moussaka, coleslaw, two kinds of corn bread – plain and Marion Cunningham’s custard-filled – and ice cream with butterscotch & chocolate sauce. I was going to make raspberry sauce too, but I got tired, so instead I am taking along a jar of maraschino cherries and one of home made granola for more toppings.
Getting tired is sort of the theme of this post – I was going to make a double batch of the chili mac, but as it got later in the night, my ambition waned. So, instead, I upset the carefully calculated hamburger meat to macaroni ratio given in the recipe – 1 1/2 pounds of meat to only 1/2 pound mac. I used about 3/4 pound of the noodles, and put some cheese right into the mix, instead of only on top as the recipe directs. I stashed the extra 1 1/2 pounds of hamburger in the freezer for later. Just a minor revolution against the prescriptiveness of the recipe, which is from Cover & Bake, a Cook’s Illustrated book, that I got on a deal to us subscribers, in which every recipe is preceeded by lengthy explanations of how the recipe was tested.
The moussaka recipe is entirely different, since it’s from Tassajara Cooking, a cook book that I’ve always loved, for giving guidelines for cooks to improvise on. I’ll have to take a picture of the cover of my ancient and splattered copy. I remember making this recipe my first fall semester at Beloit College, when I was 19, and I rediscovered the dinner party. During most of high school, I risked my Dad’s wrath by declining to join my family at the dinner table. I still remember the look on his face when I told him how fun those dinners were, lingering, eating, talking, drinking a little wine … fortunately I grew up enough to enjoy dinner with my Dad a lot more times before he died when I was 43.
My cats were so trying to get the hamburger meat – I had to keep putting things out of their reach.
Chili Mac cooling on shelf above the oven
