Essentials: Ina Garten's Mac & Cheese Recipe

The UPI reported that sales of boxed macaroni and cheese increased by 10% in 2007 (story via Jezebel). Furthermore, “half of the country's children will feast on macaroni and cheese at some point during the next two weeks.” Wow! This news will be welcomed by my sister, whose favorite way to tease me about my efforts to buy organic and/or responsible groceries is to describe what she’ll feed her hypothetical nieces and nephews when they come to visit her someday—Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, Cheetos, doughnuts, soft drinks—and how much they’ll love her for it. She’s 27, the same age I was when I made a pot of Kraft Mac & Cheese on a lark and realized I had finally outgrown it. The blue box had served me well during my first few years in New York, but my experiments with homemade macaroni and cheese eventually robbed it of its appeal.

Though my younger self would have wrinkled her nose at their crusty tops and pale interiors—in fact, I probably would have refused to eat anything that had to be sliced rather than spooned up out of an orange-glowing pot—I was pretty proud of my béchamel-bound macaroni casseroles with their rotating cast of cheeses. So I was blown away last fall when my mother served us Ina Garten’s macaroni and cheese: it was somehow much better than any I had ever made. The method is the same, but Garten, of course, gets the proportions just right. (She also tops the whole thing with buttered breadcrumbs, which I had not tried but now love, and includes sliced tomatoes, which I do not—pure cheese, please.) It is, as far as I’m concerned, the perfect recipe for soothing, uncomplicated macaroni and cheese, and it had been sitting on my shelf all this time, neglected, untapped! Now I just have to see if I can get my future kids hooked on this before their aunt gets them hooked on the other thing.

• Remember this macaroni and cheese controversy from a couple of years ago? My mom and I still wonder sometimes what Julia Moskin was thinking. Does anyone else out there hate béchamel sauce the way she does?
• On the list of things that make me ready to leave New York: macaroni and cheese with truffles.
• My favorite story about Kraft Macaroni and Cheese (what, you don’t have one?) is Calvin Trillin’s account of how he caught Alice grating Parmigiano Reggiano onto their daughters’ “Kraft dinner.”