It's no secret that I have a long-standing and intense love affair with mac and cheese. Baked, creamy, from-a-box or made from scratch...as long as it has noodles and cheese, I'm in. So when I saw this recipe for mac and cheese soup in Cuisine at Home magazine, I knew I had to put my own spin on it. Blue cheese and some other unusual flavorings give this soup an unexpected kick, so it's far from your average bowl of mac.
Ingredients:
- 1 /12 cups dry macaroni (for this, I used some spiral-shaped cavatappi instead)
- 2 tbsp unsalted butter
- 1/3 cup flour
- 1/2 cup dry white wine or cooking sherry
- 2 cups chicken broth
- 1/8 tsp nutmeg
- 1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
- 2 cups milk
- 4 cups shredded Cheddar
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- salt
- 1/4 cup crumbled bleu cheese
- 2 tbsp minced fresh chives
Start by cooking your tubular pasta of choice in a pot of salted water according to package directions. When it's ready, drain and set aside.
Melt the butter in a large saucepan, then stir in flour and cook (stirring constantly) for about one minute to make a roux. Pour in the wine/sherry to deglaze and simmer until the wine is nearly evaporated.
Stir in the chicken broth, nutmeg and cayenne. Simmer until it thickens a little (about five minutes or so), then whisk in the milk and let it slowly warm up. Whatever you do, don't let it boil. It gets grainy and gross, and no one wants that.
Stir in the cheddar cheese, about a cup at a time, letting it melt completely before adding the next batch. Then stir in the lemon juice, a dash of salt (taste it to make sure it's enough) and the pasta.
Remove your saucepan from heat and top with bleu cheese and chives. YUM. Matt and I both loved this soup, but next time I think I'm gonna try making some homemade pretzels (from a recipe on Pinterest, no doubt) to go with it. DOUBLE YUM.
Happy Halloween, all! It's cold and rainy and miserable here, so we just kind of threw handfuls of candy in the bags of the few kids who braved the nasty Ohio weather, then hightailed it inside. I was thinking about watching a scary movie tonight, but Matt's going over to a friend's to watch some Star Trek (I know, what a nerd!) and there's no way I can handle that shiz alone. I can barely handle it when he IS around! Hope the festivities are going a bit better for you guys :)
Get it? Boozy drinks? For Halloween? Okay, I suck at puns. It still makes me giggle :)
Anyway, Matt and the girls upstairs and I threw a little Halloween house party on Friday. Naturally, I turned to Pinterest for some themed drink inspiration, and I used these two pins as jumping off points:
And, in true scatterbrain fashion, I completely forgot that I pinned the above recipe for Butterbeer (just click the picture to go to the original link). So I turned to trusty old Google and found one here. I remembered a little of the first recipe, though, and kind of wound up combining the two recipes in my head to come up with this:
Basically, I just stirred together two liters of cream soda, a dash of vanilla extract, a bigger dash of butter flavoring and a healthy dose (as in, maybe a cup or two?) of butterscotch schnapps. For the foamy top, I combined some heavy cream, marshmallow fluff and butter flavoring in my food processor. (Note: When your foodpro comes with a "max fill" line, you should probably heed that warning. Unless you want cream and marshmallow fluff all over your walls.) Anyway, it was really, really delicious.
Yeah, I had to do the cheesy mustache shot. Can you blame me?
I also riffed on the idea of serving drinks in a pumpkin a little. But instead of shoving a few bottles into a gourd, I made a jack-o-lantern with a giant mouth, and filled it with...Jell-O shots! Kind of my specialty.
And if you're wondering about my costume, I was dressed as Leeloo from the movie The Fifth Element. Matt, of course, went as Korben Dallas. For some reason, he preferred the movie-climax-torn-tuxedo outfit to my preference, the bright orange tank top ;)
Did you guys go to any Halloween parties this weekend? What did you dress as?
It's been a while since I did a Fiscal Fridays post, mainly because there's not much to talk about. Ever since I got my new job six months ago, money's been pretty easy. I have enough to pay my bills, have a little fun, do a little shopping, and work on my Dave Ramsay Debt Snowball. In fact, I'm on track to pay off my next debt, the loan from my dad, about 18 months ahead of schedule. (The Best Buy credit card was the first.)
But this week, I realized that I can no longer update the software on my Macbook (I know, I know...#firstworldproblems). And my first thought was to buy a new Macbook Pro. At first, I had all these reasons in my head as to why it would be okay to charge a new computer.
Oh good lord, it's glorious.
I increased the limit on my Best Buy card, to $1,600. With that, I could easily get the 13" Macbook Pro without maxing out the card. I'd have 18 months to pay it off, in payments of less than $70 a month. And then I started thinking about why I need a new computer. After all, this one is nearly six years old. It has only one gig of RAM, and I only have about 10 gigs of space left on my hard drive. Plus, there's the whole can't-update-software thing, and the computer sometimes CRAWLS. Editing blog photos in Photoshop can be a nightmare, especially when it takes a good 20 or 30 seconds just to rotate a damn image. That brand-new Macbook Pro was practically in my shopping cart.
And then, I stopped myself.
I reminded myself that I am really trying to pay down my debt. That I'm currently on track to have everything, including my car, paid off in less than a year and a half. And while $70 a month seems like nothing in exchange for a new computer, it's $70 that I won't be able to put toward paying down my debt. Or going shopping.
And then I thought, really thought, about how my computer is working. And you know something? It still works. Yes, it's a little outdated, and yes, it's a little slow. But for about $100 (less if I take the time to scour eBay/Amazon) I can buy new RAM cards and replace my two 512 MB cards with two 1 GB cards to double my memory. I don't need a new computer. I just really want one.
Dave Ramsay says that if now you live like no one else, later you can live like no one else. What he means is, if you can ignore the "instant gratification" culture that's forced on us day in and day out, later you can have everything you want and more. Putting things I can't afford on my credit card simply because "I really want them" is what got me into this mess in the first place.
So right here and now, I'm starting a new savings plan. I'll cut into my "fun" money and start saving to buy a new computer. Because let's face it, this one won't last forever. I'll be lucky to get another year or two out of it. But if I start saving now, I might have all (or at least most) of the amount ready to go by the time this old gal kicks the bucket. And the less I charge, the better :)
shirt: old, don't remember
blazer: thrifted
slacks: New York & Company
necklace: Forever 21 or H&M? not sure.
flats: Payless
I don't usually pre-draft blog posts. I'm more of a stream-of-consciousness writer. But just now, I drafted a whole post for the (probably temporary) return of Fiscal Fridays, and let me tell you, I am all worded out. I don't even really know what that means, but it makes me giggle to say it in my head so I'm going to stick with that phrase.
I'm hoping to return to Pinspiration Mondays as well next week, with my first-ever Pinspiration recipe. Well, it's not a recipe, per se. It's a drink. Which is vaguely recipe-like, only instead of making me (and my friends) feel full, it will make us feel drunk. Because it will make us drunk. Woohoo?
