Macaroni and Cheese!

Note: Some changes were made to the recipe for mac and cheese on 26 January 2015 (my aggarationsense of portions, especially with pasta, isn't very good)

L-R, top to bottom:

Bowl with diced butternut squash and carrot/ blended mac and cheese sauce/ mac and cheese post baking/ pot of  braised pork fresh from oven/ piece of pork asking to be eaten

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One of my pots and a large bowl were tainted with Velveeta yesterday. The horror! I don't think anything THAT processed has ever come out of my kitchen - even our instant noodles are the type without seasoning (Koka brand air-fried) and usually tossed with a mix of soy sauce, black vinegar and sesame oil; the only pop-in-the-oven-straight-from-the-freezer food we've consumed is charcoal grilled Teriyaki chicken (I cannot remember which brand it is). I once bought some Japanese wasbi crispy chicken pieces and so much of it was flour and not chicken that I threw it away (it was on offer). So it doesn't count.

Before I went to sleep last night, I decided that this egregious state of affairs could not remain, and googled "healthy mac and cheese". Unfortunately, as I had earlier defrosted some pork shoulder butt, I also had to google "cooking pork shoulder butt". And upon a survey of my kitchen and fridge this morning, I made the following two things for dinner, after a trip to NTUC and discovering that we were having an impromtu dinner party tomorrow night (quantities are thus to feed 4-5 grown men and one woman on a post-pregnancy diet). 

Macaroni and Cheese

Ingredients

• Two 500g packs of elbow macaroni (I used Colavita Gomiti, which was on offer - S$4.35 for two packs. For our dinner (the two of us), I used two-thirds or so of a 500g pack (which I found to be a bit much))
• Half a medium smallish butternut squash (I bought a piece which cost S$2.17)
• One carrot (last one in my fridge, the ones you find at NTUC are more or less the same size anyway)
• About 2/3 cup of cilantro skim sour cream (I reprised the hot wings last night - evidently it was not enough for They Who Decided To Eat Velveeta - and made this dip to go along with it. I mixed about a cup of skim sour cream with a bunch of cilantro a.k.a Chinese parsley (act atas only), about three minced garlic cloves, and the juice of half a lemon. You can use normal or skim sour cream, or milk. I used skim sour cream because it was all they had at Phoon Huat when I wanted to make the dip. Value tub some more)
• One onion (I used a yellow one, you can use a red one)
• Some cheese. Now this is entirely up to you and what's in your fridge; I wanted it to be healthier so I used about 30g, maybe less, of Parmesan, and about the same amount of Mozzarella. I also threw in about 10g or so of Cheddar (it was frozen, I couldn't be bothered to chip off a large enough chunk. And yes I freeze my cheese, it keeps longer)
• About three large cloves of garlic, peeled and roughly chopped
• Olive oil
• Salt
• Pepper

Method

This method yields some baby food

The amount of sauce this recipe yields will be enough for two 500g packs about one and a quarter 500g packs of elbow pasta. If you like your mac and cheese saucy, which I don't, use one pack

1. Peel the skin off the butternut squash. I learnt online that you can do this with a vegetable peeler - the skin looks very tough right, so I initially thought you had to slice it off with a sharp knife and risk cuts. But no, you can do it safely with a vegetable peeler. Take off as much of the white stuff underneath the skin as possible, it's bitter. Remove seeds and pith. Google what to do with the seeds. Dice squash, place in heatproof bowl.
2. Peel carrot. Dice, place in heatproof bowl together with pieces of butternut squash.
3. Put heatproof bowl in a pot large enough to hold it, and fill the pot (not the bowl) with water so it comes about a third of the way up the bowl. Cover the pot, and bring the water to a boil. Let it cook for about 20 minutes or so (the water should have come to a boil and you should have turned down the flame thereafter). Check after 20 minutes that the squash and carrots are soft enough to be pureed. If they're still a bit hard, cook for a while longer. Leave cover on pot, take off the stove, let cool. 
4. Slice the onions, and fry together with the garlic in olive oil. I let them go really brown over low heat, and also salted them really well because I didn't salt the squash and carrot. 
5. Put the squash and carrots into your blender along with whatever water collected in the BOWL. Puree. Set aside three teaspoons or so for your baby, because you have no idea how much he is going to eat. 
6. Add a bit of hot water to the puree to loosen it up, then add the sour cream, onions and garlic, Parmesan and cheddar. Blend until smooth, adding more hot water (in teensy bits) to loosen up as needed. Taste, and add more salt and pepper if needed. 
7. Cook pasta in salted water until slightly underdone - it should be firmer than al dente. It took me the length of one feeding to get this texture, about ten minutes. Please keep testing your pasta for done-ness, everyone's stove is different and I didn't have it on a boil for the whole ten minutes because I had to feed FBC.
8. Add some - not too much, maybe about a third of a cup or so - of pasta water to the sauce in the blender, and blend. Taste. Hopefully it's not too salty (mine wasn't). Drain remaining pasta.
9. Mix sauce with cooked pasta in a baking dish, and top with shredded Mozzarella. Bake at 170C in a fan-forced oven for about 10 minutes, broil for about 5-10 minutes (depending on your broiler strength) or until Mozzarella turns nice and brown. You may need to turn the temperature of your oven up a touch to get that nice brown colour. 

Rum Apple Braised Pork Shoulder Butt

Ingredients

• Four large pieces of pork shoulder butt. I purchased the ones found in the "Meat" section, with the flying pig label. They were all about S$3.70-S$4++ per piece, two were on offer, for quick consumption TODAY. Choose pieces which are a bit fatter, so you can get longer pulled pork "strands" when you push it apart
• One onion, sliced thickly (I used a yellow one, of course you can use a red one, as stated above)
• Two Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored, and cut into slices (leftover from the last time I made applesauce for baking)
• Three cloves of garlic, peeled and roughly chopped
• 1l of apple juice (Ceres was on offer, thankfully. S$4.15 for two cartons)
• 1/2 cup of rum (Myer's Dark, leftover from Christmas fruit cake. You could probably use red or white wine, but the taste would be different)
• Two dried bay leaves
• Three pinches of rosemary (I froze some rosemary leaves. Yes, I believe strongly in the power of the freezer. You could probably just use dried, and had I not used my thyme in my Cajun seasoning mix, I would have used that instead. I would say about a teaspoon of dried herbs).
• Olive oil
• Salt
• Pepper

Method

1. Heat the olive oil in a large oven proof pot (used my NTUC redeemed Dutch oven), sear the meat. I used olive oil despite all that's being said about how you shouldn't be doing high heat cooking with it - so I sacrificed some of the caramelisation. You can use rice bran oil (another can of worms there, but I think it's pretty healthy and you can get a really nice crust on the meat). I wish I could tell you for sure that searing is worth the resulting oil spatter - well okay, it probably is and I've never braised meat before without searing it, but it's a pain when you have to mop the kitchen floor yourself and also check intermittently on a baby while you're cooking because oh the horror of tracking oil all over the house. But, yeah, sear it. 
2. Remove meat from pot. Fry onions, slices of apple and garlic until nice and brown. Add about 1/2 a teaspoon of salt. Deglaze pan with rum (or other alcohol), scraping off bits of fond. Add bay leaves. Return meat to pan. Pour in one carton of Ceres apple juice. The recipes I looked up all suggested adding chicken/ beef/ vegetable stock as well, and if you have some homemade stock or aren't averse to store bought (I am, but I'm not judging anybody! Honest), then by all means use maybe 3/4 of the apple juice and about a cup of stock. It would probably give you more depth of flavour. I had some frozen chicken backs but wasn't in the mood to make stock. 
3. Bring the liquid in your pot to a boil. Let it boil for about 5 minutes, then cover, take off flame, and stick pot in a 150C fan-forced oven. I gave it about 2 hours at 150C, then turned up the heat to 170C for 15 minutes or so (because I stuck the mac and cheese in). The meat was tender and easy to pull apart by then.