Mac And Cheese

...From Scratch.

If, by chance, you think you don't know how to make Mac and Cheese from scratch, but you do know how to make Orange Death (as sold in Overpriced Blue Boxes), here's the secret:

It works the same bloomin' way. You boil water, you dump pasta in, and you mix milk with flavorings and something to thicken it to make a sauce. Then you drain the water off the pasta and dump the sauce on it.

The only difference is that the flavoring and thickening business is a lot more tasty, a lot cheaper, and a lot less scary. It works like this: You melt

• some butter. You add
• an equal amount of flour to it, to make a paste. This is called a roux, which is French for fat and flour, and, by the way, I'm awesome. That's your word for the day. Use it well.

You let the paste cook for a second so it won't taste floury. Then you stir in

• one cup of cold milk for each tablespoon of butter you started with. Then you add
• chopped-up pieces of real cheese,

and they melt in and make it even thicker and a whole lot tastier. Then there's a step I don't really need to explain much about: You add

• salt until it tastes savory,
• pepper until it has enough pep, and
• paprika until you want to stop adding it. (I mean, you already know how to salt and pepper your food, right? This is nothing complicated.) And if you know what's good, you also add
• chopped-up ham.

Easy-peasy. Go dig in. Then try CelestializedMacandCheese.