Butter

As I stood at the stove grating nutmeg into the roux for my gourmet mac and cheese, it occurred to me that I had some leftover butternut squash ravioli filling thawed out in the fridge, and wouldn't that be good mixed in with the roux and the pasta?

After I mixed the pasta and the milk sauce with butternut squash, and after piling on three kinds of cheese, it thought maybe I'd better omit the breadcrumb topping this time.  But no, those buttery bread crumbs bake up to a toasty, savory crunch, so I put my French bread in the food processor and processed away.

Then as I was about to melt the butter to add to the crumbs, I remembered that I also had some brown butter hazelnut sage sauce left over from the ravioli, so why not use that to butter the crumbs?  After all, everything I had in the pasta melded with the nutmeg-parmesan-pasta-cheese theme.  So that's what I did.

I'll let you  know later how this turns out, but in the meantime, the calorie count is obscene.  Julia Child would be proud of me though--there is enough butter in this dish to satisfy even someone who said you just couldn't have too much butter.  I think maybe you can.  I think maybe I have.

Cold and RAINY!

It doesn't matter if it's cold--I can climb on the treadmill--but what really matters is the rain.  Our part of the country was declared a disaster area because of the drought, and though this may not last long, at least my back yard won't be a disaster area too. 

Time to break out the Sopranos and hop onto the machine.