Salmon Mac & Cheese

It's been months since my last post. Well, things have been very hectic lately with gazillion things that has to be done in a very short period of time.

Anyway, lil G has been having eating tantrum again. She didn't want to eat what the maid cooked her (mommy too busy to cook lately... i'm so sorry baby). This time, she really drove me to insanity. The only food she would eat pretty much unhealthy junk food. Cakes, chips, cookies...

Well, after finding a cute moon and star shaped pasta, I decided to try giving her macaroni and cheese or in this case I should call it moon and star pasta and cheese? hehehe.... I'm glad she finished almost the entire mini pot of the mac n cheese (with daddy finishing the last scoop), which she didn't even realized she was eating salmon. The one fish that she always refused to eat. Enough rambling, here is the recipe.

Salmon Mac n Cheese

Serve 2 mini pots (about 9 cm in diameter)

3 tbsp butter
1 tbsp flour
3 tsp djon mustard
1/8 cup cream
1/3 cup milk
1/3 cup macaroni (or cute kids pasta)
40 gr salmon filet
50 gr grated gruyere cheese
25 gr kraft quick melt or velveeta cheese
2 tbsp seasoned breadcrumbs

1. Preheat the oven to 180 C. Butter two mini cast iron pots (9cm) or ramekins, whichever you have in your kitchen.
2. Boil pasta 3/4 cooked, set aside. Pan fry salmon, 3/4 cooked and flake.
3. Melt butter in a small saucepan, add the flour once all the butter as melt mix well. Add the cream little by little while stirring followed by milk and mustard. Make sure the sauce is smooth. Continue stirring until it thickens. Add both cheeses and continue stir until thick.
4. Combine the sauce with pasta and salmon, mix well.
5. Pour mac n cheese mixture into the dish and sprinkle seasoned bread crumbs on top. Bake in the oven for +/- 20-30 minutes until the bread crumbs turn golden brown and sauce is bubbly.

Note: If you don't have seasoned bread crumbs, I normally just mix panko flour with some italian seasoning.

For this particular recipe, I didn't really measure my ingredients so it's an estimate how much ingredients I use in the mac n cheese.

Oatmeal Cheese Biscuits

After buying store bought baby biscuits for months, it suddenly hit me, why don't I try making my own biscuits. Since I love baking, why not just tweak around some old recipes and I came up with this one. It's simple, don't require much ingredients and the only thing u need to do is mix everything in a food processor. No fancy mixers or anything like that. The only thing I really wanted to use in this recipe is whole wheat flour. Unfortunately, I can't find any supermarket in Jakarta that sells whole wheat flour so I used organic unbleached all purpose flour instead.

I cut the dough into rectangles since it's Saturday and I just can't be bothered to cut it using cookie cutter. hehehe...

Oatmeal Cheese Biscuits

1/2 cup oatmeal
1 1/4 cup organic unbleached all purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 cup grated cheese (I use Gouda, but any kind of old hard cheese will do)
100 gr cold butter, cut into cubes
100 ml milk, cold

1. Preheat the oven to 175 C
2. In a food processor, ground oatmeal until it become fine powder. Sift the ground oatmeal together with flour and baking powder into a bowl.
3. Put flour in a food processer, add cold butter, little bit at a time and pulse until it resembles a coarse meal.
4. Add cheese, and continue pulsing. Pour milk, a little at a time until mixture turn into a ball.
5. On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough between two sheets of parchment papers until it's about 5mm thick, and put it in the fridge for 20 minutes.
6. After 20 minutes, cut the dough into bite size pieces using knife, or various shapes using cookie cutter.
7. Bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes until golden and crunchy.

Tip: if using cookie cutter, dip the cutter into flour so the dough won't stick to your cookie cutter.