culinary wins and losses

shalmestere called from work saying she wanted mac & cheese for dinner. There were a few ingredients we needed to pick up, so I went to the grocery store. No Dreamfields pasta, and she's been allegedly on a low-FODMAP diet for a few weeks, so I got two kinds of non-wheat pasta, of which the less-weird seemed to be the brown-rice fusilli. Instructions on the box say to boil for 12 minutes, not the 10 minutes typical of wheat rotini, but I was doing the Mollie Katzen recipe in which the pasta cooks in a casserole dish for 45 minutes in the liquids from the rest of the recipe rather than being boiled separately in water, so I just followed the recipe. After 45 minutes I pulled the casserole out of the oven and dolloped some onto plates, but we both concluded the pasta was really underdone, so I dolloped it back into the casserole, added a bit more buttermilk, and put it back in the oven for another 15 minutes. At which point shalmestere was too hungry to wait any more; the pasta was slightly less underdone, but she ate it anyway. I added some ordinary milk and put it back into the oven for yet another 15 minutes, after which the pasta was adequately done. Still not the best mac-and-cheese I've ever made.

Also baked sourdough bread yesterday. The loaf came out of the oven gorgeous, and after only a few minutes' cooling I cut a slice to eat with butter... at which point I realized I had forgotten to add any salt to the dough, so it wasn't as flavorful as usual. Good texture, though.