So, two of our kids have been begging for mac n cheese. My hubby and those two kids are big fans of Kraft Mac N Cheese, but that is not sold here. So, I thought I'd make some mac n cheese from scratch. It wouldn't be like Kraft, but maybe they'd be happy with it. I haven't made it for years and my recipes and cookbooks are still waiting to be delivered here. I searched online for a recipe, but what came up first were all metric recipes (I searched on Google Australia). Metric would be fine but I have no idea how much 50g of butter is and have no scale for measuring it. So I searched again and found some more recipes, this time in standard measurements. No problem I thought. I started boiling water and preheating the oven, which for some reason only went to 250 degrees. How was I going to cook something at 350? I just set the oven to high and went about my way. I finished the mac n cheese and put into the oven to bake. After a very short time in the oven, a light went off in my head and I realized that the temps on the oven were Celsius! Oh crap, I yanked my mac n cheese out, but it was already very crisp on top. I cooled the oven down to the proper temp of about 175 and continued baking. Of course, I was trying to be on the ball with dinner for once. While it was baking, Jay emailed to let me know that we were eating out with a couple people from work. Oh. So I then had to cool down the mac n cheese all the way and put in the fridge for the next day.
We ate it yesterday with pork cutlets, veggies, and pineapple. It wasn't very good. I will need to find a different recipe and next time make sure that we are eating at home.
On a related note, the pork cutlets were great. Meat selection in grocery stores is very different from the US. There is only a small amount of pork available. Beef is about the same but not labeled at 93% lean or anything. Chicken is much smaller than in the US. There is also a huge selection of lamb (Jay loves, but I do not), mutton (never tried it), veal (no thanks), and kangaroo. Yes, I said kangaroo. There is also a little ground turkey for $10 a kilogram. All the meat here is healthier than in the US. No hormones and most things are free range.
I'm sure that I get the hang of it. I will just need to make a cheat sheet for the temps.
On a different topic, the kids' beds here are not twin beds. They are single beds. Single beds are a fair bit smaller than twins. What this means is that all the twin bed sheets and bed pads won't fit. Boy, am I glad that I used some of our weight allowance to ship them. Geez.
Alton Brown does a good Mac n Cheese and I follow a blog: Cooksterella, a friend of a friend. She is in the Netherlands and uses the same measurements that would be commom in AU...she also includes a link to a conversion page so you can make do either way.
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