Macaroni and cheese

It's a simple thing, for kids, don't let all these words suggest otherwise.

My friends are telling me I am too thin. Skinny. My friends are quite rude and direct. And other little hints are happening too that are starting to make me think maybe they could possibly be right. I was sitting there outside the Auraria campus library looking at my new book from there minding my own business when these three guys, brutes all, came up and dragged me off. They drilled a hook in my head and hung me up in the research department and left me there to hang painfully. Then students came up and grabbed my hand and rattled my arm, and another grabbed my foot and rattled my leg. They laughed and laughed at me rattling my arms and legs and then left and there I was left hanging by my head again. I used my arms to swing around and unscrewed the hook by centrifugal force and escaped. Now I have an unsightly hole in the top of my head. You can feel it if you want to. 

So this mac and cheese is a stick-to-your-ribs kind of thing. It has whole milk and it is loaded with cheese and I mean loaded, it is mostly cheese. 

Obviously this would be easier to buy the noodles already made. Nobody does this because there is little point to it. The thing is I didn't have any elbow pasta so I made them. That gave me a chance to fortify them with egg and semolina flour. 

The dough balls are visible wrapped and resting, autolyzing, becoming more manageable. They will be dropped into the feed tube and rotated out and extruded through a press. 

There are three types of cheese but there doesn't have to be. I could have added other types too but I didn't feel like it. Parmigiano was the last to be grated and when I ran the block across the grater the aroma that wafted up was amazing. I stood there and thought, wow there it is.

Thank you Italy. You're the best.

There is a steep difference between the pile of cheese on the right and the other two, but all three are very good. 

What I am not showing would go here. A pot with butter in it and an equal amount of flour. A light roux with light seasoning because this is a meal for children, but it must include nutmeg which changes everything and adds an odd sweetness and fullness. Anything on top of that risks being distracting, and having said that, this is for myself, not really for children like I just now said, so I went ahead and distracted with cayenne and with sage. Milk for a thin sauce, then all the cheese, then the pasta, topped with bread crumbs and possibly cheese and finally baked until the top browns, everything inside is already cooked. 

If you would buy the prepared pasta noodles then they cook faster than the instructions say on the box. Instructions say seven minutes but that is too long even at high altitude where water boils at much lower temperature. Small elbow pasta is mush at seven minutes so ignore the instructions and boil until they reach al dente in about five minutes. These noodles cooked in three minutes because they are fresh, slightly longer because they contain semolina, they cannot be al dente because these noodles were never dried.