Macaroni and Cheese

Beryl Stokes: Hi! Welcome to Cajun Cooking TV. Tonight, we're going to show you a quick and easy Macaroni and Cheese. So let's get started. First, we need to heat up three cups of milk, this is whole milk, you can use skimmed milk, and that's just fine. So we're going to heat it in the microwave for about one and half minutes. Our next step is we need to make a white roux with some butter and flour. We have three tablespoons of butter already melted here. And we have a quarter cup of all purpose flour. And Ashley is going to mix this together for about two minutes. We're going to let it mix it up really good with your nonstick whisk. There we go, and let this cook for about one minute. We don't want it to get dark, like a dark roux but then we're going to mix it in the milk. Careful, pour in the milk and just slowly turn it around and mix up the flour and butter. And we're actually going to bring this to a boil. We've got our stove at medium heat on number 6, on my stove. So this is going to come to a boil and we're actually going to keep stirring this constantly for ten minutes and it's going to become a quick, I mean as thick white sauce. Okay, in a medium saucepan, we have a part of water boiling here. And we have two cups of elbow macaroni, so we're going to toss this into the boiling water. Put a little bit of sea salt in there. We're going to stir this up, bring it back to a full boil, and we only want to boil the noodles for about three minutes, we don't want to fully cook them because they will cook when we're baking this in the oven. And Ashley is still stirring on her white roux. Ashley: Do you want me to turn that down? Beryl Stokes: No, you can keep it right there. So we still got about six minutes to go on our white roux here. Drain macaroni in a colander. Rinse with cold water. Return to stove for mixing in the sauce. Okay we're back. We have a thick white sauce here. And we're going to add in a few little spices. We have an eighth of a teaspoon each of black pepper, cayenne pepper, and nutmeg, ground nutmeg. So we're going to put that into our white sauce so we can mix it up good before we put the cheese. Put it in, we just want to whisk that in really well. Just a little bit of spice, not too much. Now Ashley, we'll get the cheese, cheese. We're going to put in about four cups of shredded cheddar cheese, and we have taken this off the heat in order to do this and it's hot enough to melt the cheese. We're going to leave some in this bowl for putting on top after it's cooked. Put over there. Ashley: Do you want me to mix it? Beryl Stokes: Can you mix it but we'll need a spoon. Ashley: Spoon. Beryl Stokes: Try with this. Ashley: This isn't really going to be good. Beryl Stokes: Okay. That's our finger-lickin' good, whisk right there. Mix until that's melt. Now we're just adding in a little bit of macaroni at a time, and mix in it in with the cheese sauce. And we're about ready to put it in a casserole dish, where we'll be baking it on a 400 degree oven for 25-30 minutes. And we'll be ready to eat soon. Ashley: We just sprayed, and we're about to put in the microwave. Beryl Stokes: It looks so good Bake on 350 F for 30 minutes uncovered. It's ready. Okay we've taken it out of the oven, it's been 30 minutes. It looks so good. It's got the browning on the top. I've got some leftover cheese here, shredded cheddar cheese. We're going to spread this around the top and just the heat from the casserole is going to melt this. So it's going to be Ooey and Gooey with good cheese. Ashley: Yes it is. Beryl Stokes: Yummy. We've got some Quarterhouse snacks cooking, we have a little bit of broccoli cooking here. We're going to have a good Saturday night everybody. And this is the Cajun Cooking TV. We're showing you how to make macaroni and cheese, the short version and it's really simple. Thank you Ashley for helping me tonight and we'll see you next time. Oh don't forget to check out the website for the full recipe, it's cajuncookingtv.com. Bye-bye. Ashley: Bye-bye.