Macaroni and cheese for one

The stuff in the box is never as good as from-scratch baked macaroni and cheese, but from-scratch M&C is also a big time and dish hog and gives you a ton of leftovers. If you like toasty bread crumbs on top of your dish, the leftovers are also a letdown. Here's my take on single-shot mac and cheese:

Cook a generous handful of macaroni noodles in about three cups of boiling water. Just cook them until they are al dente.

Drain the noodles and dump them into your smallest baking dish. You might have a more suitable dish than you thought, just hanging around. For example, I have a pair of little springforms that would do.

Into the noodles, mix 1/4 cup milk and 1/4 to 1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese. You may heat the milk, but if not, be sure to put the cheese in first to encourage more uniform melting. You will notice that this way of making "sauce" will not give you that super-thick result you'd get from real sauce, but this is a quick-and-easy way to go.

Grate a generous amount of black pepper and nutmeg over the dish, then top with bread crumbs. You could tear up one heel of an old loaf of white bread, for example, into little bits.

Bake the dish at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes, or until the dish is bubbly and the crumbs are crispy.

Allow to cool for a few minutes, then dig in.

Pots and pans

When I moved into my cramped kitchen in 1999, I'd been living in much more spacious quarters, so I had a big collection of pots and pans.

• Soup pots? Small and large.
• Frying pans? Four or five - three sizes of cast iron, plus a Revereware pan and a medium Calphalon pan.
• A small saucepan
• A large saucepan
  
• A stovetop-mac-and-cheese size pot
• A Dutch oven
• An absurd plug-in electric frying pan
  

It took me a couple of years to whittle the collection down to the essentials, mostly because I was reluctant to Goodwill so many nice pans.

Now I have:

• One cast-iron frying pan (about 10 inches)
• One small saucepan (stovetop mac and cheese size)
• One large saucepan (mac and cheese for 10)
• Two large soup pots (about 10 quarts).
• That Dutch oven, be it ever so infrequently used.

The soup pots are identical and both contain large and small steaming baskets. I probably only *need* one, but if you're feeding 20-30 every so often, the flexibility is a big plus. As for the Dutch oven, well, they're expensive, so I'm loath to ditch it. I keep thinking I'll do a bean-hole supper some fall, too, in which case it will be wicked useful.