I won’t be this prolific for long, I’m sure, but I’ve had a few posts stewing in me, which is why I finally decided I should just dive in.  Continuing on the theme of my sister (and quietly laying the groundwork for my master plan which is to get her writing about her own recipes) and her coworkers, she told me another story, on the same trip to Costco to buy reading glasses and an EZ pass for dad. I don’t remember what the story was supposed to be about, but it wound up being about her mac and cheese and her coworkers who don’t cook. About how they ooh and awww when she brings mac and cheese to a potluck “when I just put some Wensleydale and a swiss and it isn’t any big deal.” So she starts into how she was trying to explain to her coworkers that home made mac and cheese is easy and you just have to start with a white sauce, but no one knew what a white sauce is. So she says “first you make a roux” and they all stare at her like she’s speaking french. Which she is.

This story was on my mind, this story about “first you make a roux” and all the blank stares, when I called Noah to tell him that we had broccoli and some fresh pita and not a whole lot else. He asked after our cheese stocks and whether we couldn’t have some cheese on our broccoli. And so I made a roux. I haven’t done that in 10 years, but I cracked open Joy and found a cheese sauce recipe (Sauce Mornay, to be precise) and ignored it entirely. Not entirely. Actually, I followed the first half pretty closely, and then tripled the amount of cheese. If you don’t have the Joy, find a standard cookbook, the kind that might have a recipe for at least Bechamel. When it is done, stir in 3/4 cup of cheese and spoon it on some food that needs cheese sauce.

The Joy recipe has you simmer the milk with  half an onion, a few cloves and a bay leaf  before you add it in to the sauce. You don’t have to, but that was a nice touch.

So we had a lot of steamed broccoli and some cheese sauce along with some  manaeesh, which is just bread and zaatar, which was good.

As a rule, I file cheese sauce under “well sure, anything tastes good with enough butter on it” but, well, it is true. So it was good.

Zaatar is just oregano, thyme, sumac, sesame seeds … and some kind of secret ingredients, which is why when I buy Sahadi’s zaatar mix it tastes better than when I try to mix my own spices. You take the spice mix and mix it with enough olive oil to make a paste and you spread it on, if you are lazy, pita bread. If you are classy, you make fresh flatbread, which probably tastes fantastic. You put it in a hot oven (500) for as long as it takes for the bread to get nice and hot.

Since we almost always have pita in the freezer, this was a serious scraps of the fridge meal.

PS. I was thinking about Winnie and her Wensleydale and almost bought some Wensleydale today but it had ginger and figs in it and even though right now that sounds amazing, when I was standing in line at the cheese store it sounded like the kind of thing that could go either way, even at $3/lb.