The Cheese Eaters

So today I was reading the book section of the Chicago Tribune, which I like to do so I can add new books to my library request list, and happened upon a review of a novel called "Bleeding Kansas" by Sara Paretsky. The reviewer, Amy Gutman, is also a novelist, and her excellent review made me want to read her books, too, so the library list is growing a bit. To complicate matters further, in the review she quoted a book by Thomas Frank called "What's the Matter With Kansas?" and the bit she quoted made me want to read that, too. He writes that hard-line conservatives think "that liberals are identifiable by their tastes and consumer preferences and that these tastes and preferences reveal the essential arrogence and foreignness of liberalism... [i]n particular the things that liberals are said to drink, eat, and drive: the Volvos, the imported cheese, and above all, the lattes." And, by gosh... Volvo, check. Lattes, check. But we were sorely, sorely behind the times in our consumption of fancy imported cheeses.

Enter dinner: it seemed like a great night to make the excellent Four-Cheese Rigatoni recipie passed along by a (strangely, not necessarily liberal) friend. Here's the recipe, copied directly, so sic and all that. I find that I need to add a bit more flour to make the sauce thicken perfectly, but it's fairly easy and very, very good.

Baked Rigatoni with Four Cheese

1T salt
1lb dried pasta such as fusilli, penne, rigatoni, or ziti
6T (3/4 stick) unsalted butter
1/2 flour
4 cups milk
2 cups evaporated milk
Fresh ground pepper to taste
Freshly grated nutmeg to taste
1 1/2 cups each

* shredded Gruyere
* shredded Emmenthaler
* shredded sharp Cheddar

1 cup grated Parmesan-Reggiano

1) Stir the 1T of salt into a large pot of boiling water. Boil pasta until tender but still firm. Drain and rinse under cold water. Set aside.

2) Preheat Oven to 350 and grease a 9x13 baking dish

3) Melt butter over low heat and whisk in flour and cook; whisking or stirring almost constantly until bubbly and fragant. ~5 minutes, but do not brown.

4) In another saucepan, combine milk and evaporated milk and bring just to a boil over medium-high heat. Pour all at once into butter/flour mixture and whish until smooth. Season now with salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Place the pan over medium-high heat and cook for 5 minutes or until the mixture has thickened. Pour over the pasta and spread the pasta evenly in the baking dish.

5) Combine the cheeses and sprinkle evenly over the pasta. Bake for about 25 minutes until the cheese is melted and the pasta is heated through.

6) Transfer to the broiler to brown the cheese, about 3 minutes.

Voila! The best 4 cheese pasta! For this recipe, I recommend highly the TJ's Penne that comes in the yellow bag.