comfort food

i'm a little behind on the blogging. this is from just about two weeks ago. a super rich mac and cheese. turns out we were carb loading for the home stretch...

cleaned up a bunch of chard. tore the stems from the leaves and blanched them separately. boiled the pasta in the same salty water.

meanwhile, i softened a bunch of onions and garlic in butter. chopped up the chard stems and did those too. made a roux in the same pan using about the same amount of flour that i had started with in butter, maybe about 1/2 c. once the roux had cooked a bit, i added about 2 c. milk and whisked everything together. at this point, you just wanted to be heating the milk- not letting it boil, so i took things off the heat and let the pan do the warming. added three kinds of cheese- smokey gouda, swiss and some manchego. i let all this melt into a sauce and poured it over the pasta.

in the casserole, i layered the cheesy pasta with the chard leafs. and topped the whole thing off with my new favorite breadcrumbs! (ran stale bread thru the processor and toasted in olive oil and garlic, then tossed with fresh parsley). baked the whole thing for about a half hour and it was soooo good.