It occurs to me, as I contemplate my dinner options for tonight, that I really play fast and loose with recipes. Tonight was going to be macaroni and cheese and ham. This recipe has morphed considerably from the time it came into ours family. Twenty-eight years ago, when my mom was a newly minted cardiac nurse, she got the mother-of-all macaroni and cheese recipes from a patient. The secret to this recipe is that the sauce is based on a roux.

When I grew up and started cooking on my own, I started tweaking the recipe. I used the microwave to make the roux because I was hopeless at making it on the stove. Then I upsized the recipe to make a larger casserole. My mother had been adding ham for years, but I raised the stakes by adding broccoli. Unfortunately, my husband is not fond of this variation. (I will include the original and modified recipes at the bottom of the post.) Read the rest of this entry