Not Your Ordinary Mac & Cheese

So this past weekend was my husband's birthday celebration! Happy 29th birthday, Mike! We went to the wonderful J Alexanders for lunch since a certain Ms. Sarah will not tolerate late at night dinners an hour away very well. While there, I had what's called "Not Your Ordinary Mac & Cheese." My husband, being a big fan, went on and on about how we needed to find this recipe. I found a copy cat recipe online and made it. There are changes we need to make, but overall this is a DIVINE mac and cheese!

Here's what you need:
1.5 cups elbow macaroni
3TBS butter, divided (the real stuff, don't go all country crock on me here)
2 TBS flour
2 cups heavy cream (the real stuff here too. No, you cannot use half and half. No, you cannot use whole milk instead. Just use the cream, your life will be better for it.)
1/2 of a minced onion
1 bay leaf
1/4 tsp paprika (but next time I'm bumping it up to 1/2.)
2 1/4 cup gruyere cheese
salt
black pepper
1/2 cup fresh bread crumbs (I cut up an Italian loaf)

Here's how you make it:

Cook 1.5 cups macaroni and set aside.

Next, take 2TBS of butter and 2TBS of flour to make a roux. Cook it for three minutes, stirring constantly. SLOWLY add in the cream. It is very important that you add the cream in a tiny bit at a time at first. The roux is hot and the cream, even if it's room temperature is much colder and you will seize your roux and create clumps. Clumpy cheese sauce = no bueno.

Stir in the onion, bay leaf, and paprika. Simmer, stir often, and let it simmer for 15 minutes. It will thicken. A lot. Don't worry, beautiful things are happening. Remove from heat and get that bay leaf out. Stir in 1.5 cups of cheese and season with salt and pepper. WARNING: you will need a decent amount of salt. Stir in macaroni.

In a separate bowl, melt the remaining 1TBS butter (maybe I used two) and add in the bread crumbs. I also salted the bread crumbs because salt is good, while being bad.

Butter a deep baking dish. The one I used is the round deep dish baker by Pampered Chef (holla!). Pour in half of the mac mixture and layer in half of the remaining cheese. Pour in the rest of the mac, sprinkle the rest of the cheese, and top with the bread crumbs.

Here is an important note: the world is only made better by crunchy topping. I used at least twice as many bread crumbs as this recipe calls for.

Once it's assembled, pop it in a 350 oven for about 20 minutes, then crank up the broiler. Watch it carefully, but buttered bread crumbs and broilers love each other, and make beautiful food happen.

Here's what my finished product looked like:

And here are a few lovely snaps of my adorable little girl!

Sarah loves playing with things mom takes off of the furniture to dust! I also spy a huge black trash bag full of all the clothes she has outgrown that I need to take to storage! *sniff sniff*

ooo alarm clocks and camera battery chargers!

playing on mom and dad's bed!