Macaroni, bleh

Jennifer loves cooking shows, Iron Chef esp. And she loves to cook, sometimes. And cleaning up? Never.

But after looking through a cook book, she took a wild hair to eschew Kraft's mac and cheese and make homemade macaroni. My hubby sniffed at the idea: "I like it from the box"

Great, we shot back. While you dine on that orange dye #2 stuff, we'll dine on haute cuisine made with real butter. Just like Julia would make it.

So off we went to the store to buy 3 kinds of cheese and heavy cream (not a Weight Watcher's recipe this one). And we got to work. The kitchen looked like a disaster when we were done. And since you had to make a roux of sorts, the stove was a mess. As we put the last few ingredients in, we stopped.

Nutmeg?

Yes, it called for a dash of nutmeg. So we took a pinch and threw it in, and popped it in the oven. 20 minutes later, the entire house smelled like we were baking eggnog. And it tasted like it too.

Since Gary had refused to eat the stuff on principle, he was in the TV room fixing a broken DirectTV box. So we did the rare thing of sitting at the table and eating a meat we'd cooked ourselves, from scratch. And it still tasted like eggnog. So we both grabbed for the salt and pepper about the same time and laid it on.

The taste was better, but not great. And certainly not worth all the work we put into this. Gary tried to be gracious, and told us, after deigning to eat it, that it wasn't that bad.

We knew he was lying. But we appreciated the effort.