Bechamel, and simple mac and cheese

It's March. And, as I usually do at about this point in the year, I drifted off my health plan which, this year, consisted of calorie counting. Because of this:

Bechamel.


You may remember that I discovered bechamel when making this pesto lasagna. Without realizing it, I was actually making a bechamel for this pot pie as well. And a close cousin of the bechamel is a beurre manie which I now realize I used in this mushroom bourgignon.

Bechamel is now my go-to recipe for using up milk, specifically 2%. I feel like lower fat milk isn't as useful as full fat in cooking, but isn't too bad in a bechamel.


I started with 3 tablespoons of butter and 3 tablespoons of flour (that is called a roux, in case you were wondering). I added 2 cups of 2% milk and let that heat up until thick, then let it sit aside for a bit.


Meanwhile, in order to use up this bechamel, I cooked up some pasta and at the last minute, threw in some spinach - because I needed to offset the unhealthy quotient a tad.


I took about 1/4-1/3 of a cup of the bechamel and re-warmed it, turned off the heat, then dumped in about 1/2 a cup of shredded gruyere and a couple of tablespoons of pecorino. Yup, this is where my calorie counting went awry.


A little salt and pepper to taste (ok yes, another sprinkling of pecorino too).


Mixed it with the pasta and spinach (what a feeble effort to be healthy!).


Some toasted breadcrumbs on top would have been nice!

The best mac and cheese ever? Hardly! But perfectly fine for when you need just a quick hit of cheesy gooey-ness. And the leftover bechamel? Well that's...

to be continued...