Easy Stovetop Macaroni and Cheese

Halloween night, Day twenty-four of ninety, and I want to tell you about the porch before I tell you about the dinner, because the porch is the part of the night that mattered most.

Cody sat on the front porch from six o’clock to eight-thirty handing out candy. The lopsided pumpkin from the previous Sunday was on the step next to him, candle still going, the off-kilter grin glowing in the dark. He had a big plastic bowl in his lap with candy corn and Tootsie Rolls and a bag of those generic chocolate caramel things you buy at Dollar General for two bucks. Mama had bought the candy on her way home from work Friday, $5.97 total, more than we usually spend on Halloween candy because we usually do not get a lot of trick-or-treaters and have decided in past years to keep the porch light off. This year Mama said, let’s have the porch light on. I said, okay, Mama. Cody said, I’ll take the porch.

What happened on the porch is a thing I want to put on the page in detail. Cody greeted every kid who came up the walk by name when he knew the name, and by costume when he did not. Hey, Spider-Man. Hey, princess. Hey, look at that werewolf. He let them pick their own pieces from the bowl, two each, the kind of slow ceremony with a six-year-old that takes thirty seconds when an adult would have just dumped two pieces in the bag. Mrs. Henderson’s grandson Eli came up the walk with his mama Renee and his dad. Eli was a fireman. Cody made a big show of checking Eli’s plastic helmet, asking him whether he was on duty, and when Eli said yes, Cody said, then you get an extra Tootsie Roll for being on duty, and gave him three pieces instead of two. Eli giggled the unguarded six-year-old laugh he giggles. Renee, watching, did not say anything but I saw her face from inside the screen door, and her face had a small kind of softness in it that I am writing down because I think the neighborhood is treating us a little differently this fall and I want to mark when I notice.

The total kid count was forty-one. I counted from the kitchen window. Forty-one trick-or-treaters came up our walk in two and a half hours. That is more kids than have come to this porch on Halloween in any year I can remember. Mrs. Henderson down the street had told everybody about Mister Cody’s pumpkin. People had walked the extra block on the route to come see it. People who had not come to our porch in years had come this year, because Mrs. Henderson at the end of the block had said something about the boy who lived three doors down who had carved the pumpkin, and the people had come.

I am writing that on the page because reputation in a small Oklahoma neighborhood does not move fast and is not adjusted easily. My brother has spent two years building a reputation in this neighborhood as the kid who is going wrong, and the reputation has been earned. The reputation has not been a misunderstanding. The reputation has been the truth of the last two years. And tonight, Halloween, the first Halloween since the arrest, my brother sat on a porch with a lopsided pumpkin and gave candy to forty-one children and Mrs. Henderson at the end of the block told her grandson’s mother and the neighborhood walked over to see, and the reputation, I am willing to say, started a small adjustment tonight. I do not want to overstate it. The adjustment is small. But the adjustment started.

And then the dinner. I made stovetop mac and cheese with a real cheese sauce, because Halloween is a kid-food night and because I was tired and because mac and cheese with real cheese sauce is exactly the kind of food a person eats while a bowl of candy corn waits next to them and the doorbell rings every five minutes.

The recipe was Averie Cooks’ easy stovetop version. The math: a pound of elbow macaroni, eighty-nine cents at Aldi. Three tablespoons of butter, about thirty cents’ worth. Three tablespoons of all-purpose flour, ten cents. Two and a half cups of whole milk, sixty cents. Two cups of shredded sharp cheddar, $1.99 at Aldi for an eight-ounce bag. A half cup of shredded parmesan, sixty cents’ worth from the small container left over from last week’s baked ziti. A teaspoon of salt, half a teaspoon of black pepper, a pinch of dry mustard powder. Total: about $5.40 for a pot that fed the three of us with one container of leftovers for my Tuesday Sonic-shift lunch.

The technique is the same one I have been using for the loaded potato soup and the chicken pot pie filling and now the mac and cheese, which I want to write down because I have realized this week that the technique is the same technique, and the recognizing of it is the part of cooking I am most excited about right now. The technique is the roux-bechamel-mornay sequence. Step one: melt butter in a saucepan over medium-low heat. Step two: whisk in an equal amount of flour and cook, stirring, for a full minute until the smell goes from raw to nutty. Step three: slowly whisk in milk, a half cup at a time, until you have a smooth thickened sauce. Step four: take off the heat and stir in shredded cheese. Step five: combine with cooked pasta or potatoes or chicken or whatever you are saucing. The same five steps. Different cheeses, different liquids, different flavorings, but the same five steps every time.

I am realizing as I write this that learning to cook is partly the learning of techniques like this one — small five-step sequences that work in twenty different recipes — and the magazines and the YouTube videos do not always tell you that. The magazines treat each recipe like a separate thing. The truth is that there are about thirty techniques in cooking, and once you have learned them, you can do most of what most home cooking calls for. I am writing that down because I have decided that the back section of my notebook is going to start being a section of techniques, not just recipes. Roux. Sweat. Sear. Braise. Reduce. Each one with a small description and a list of recipes that use it.

The mac and cheese came together in twenty minutes. Mama got home from her shift at seven-fifteen and ate at the kitchen table while Cody was still on the porch handing out candy. Mama said, baby, this is what mac and cheese is supposed to taste like, and ate two helpings. Then I took over the candy duty so Cody could come in and eat his bowl. He came in around eight. He sat at the kitchen table. He had two helpings. He said, I forgot how good real mac and cheese is. He went back to the porch with the bowl in his lap to finish off the last of the trick-or-treaters until the porch light went off at eight-thirty. The bowl, when Cody brought it back inside, was almost empty.

I am writing this on Tuesday morning. The pumpkin is still on the front step but the candle has been blown out. The candy bowl has about six pieces of candy corn left in the bottom. The X marks on the calendar are at twenty-four. Sixty-six days to go. We are working for the deferred. The Halloween night, like the Sunday morning of the cinnamon rolls, is going on the page in pen, because some weeks have moments worth holding.

The recipe is below, the way Averie Cooks wrote it. The trick I want you to keep is the dry mustard powder — a pinch of it is the secret behind every cheese sauce that tastes more complex than the cheese itself. The recipe takes twenty minutes. Make it the next time you have a bowl of candy corn waiting next to a porch light. Make it any other time too. Real cheese sauce is one of the techniques worth keeping in the back of your notebook.

Prep Time: 5 minutes | Cook Time: 20 minutes | Total Time: 25 minutes | Servings: 6

Ingredients

2 cups elbow macaroni, uncooked
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups whole milk
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 1/2 cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese
1/2 cup shredded Monterey Jack or American cheese
1/2 teaspoon salt, plus more for pasta water
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon dry mustard powder
Pinch of smoked paprika

Instructions

Cook the pasta. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the elbow macaroni and cook according to package directions until just al dente, about 7–8 minutes. Drain and set aside. Do not rinse.
Make the roux. In the same pot over medium heat, melt the butter. Whisk in the flour and cook, stirring constantly, for about 1 minute until the mixture turns slightly golden and smells nutty.
Build the sauce. Slowly pour in the milk and heavy cream, whisking continuously to prevent lumps. Cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until the sauce thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon, about 4–5 minutes.
Add the cheese. Reduce heat to low. Stir in the shredded cheddar and Monterey Jack a handful at a time, letting each addition melt fully before adding the next. Season with the salt, pepper, mustard powder, and paprika. Stir until the sauce is smooth and creamy.
Combine and serve. Add the drained macaroni back to the pot and stir to coat every noodle in the sauce. Taste and adjust salt as needed. Serve immediately straight from the pot.

Nutrition (per serving)

Easy Stovetop Macaroni and Cheese — The Halloween Night Dinner with Real Cheese Sauce