Béchamel Gravy

When you watch enough Food Network and Cooking Channel, you get the courage to try what you see.

Case in point: béchamel.

I decided to try to make a béchamel based mac & cheese. The final product would include Italian sausage and frozen mixed veggies. The full list of ingredients included:

Large elbow macaroni, cooked (I don't know how much, but I have more than half a box left),

Shredded cheese (I used a gruyere from the $5 or less bin at my local supermarket),

2 ½ links of Italian sausage, cut into bite size pieces and cooked (Basically half of a 5-link pack),

A regular sized package of frozen mixed vegetables, and

The Béchamel sauce.

I get a lot of recipes from a cookbook so old¹, its recipe for baked custard recommends scalding unpasteurized milk, as if unpasteurized milk was easily accessible and available.

Their recipe for a basic béchamel called for

2 tablespoons of butter which you melt in a skillet, to which you add

2 tablespoons of floor and whisk until well mixed, to which you add

1 cup of milk and continue whisking until it thickens.

What I did was start with the skillet in which I had cooked my Italian sausage. After pouring out the excess grease, I added

2 tablespoons of butter, melting it in the pan, to which I added

2 tablespoons of flour, whisking until well mixed, to which I added

1 cup of milk, whisking as it thickened

Which is when I realized I'd just made gravy.

béchamel + meat drippings = gravy

Oops.

Soldiering on, I added the cheese, whisking until it was melted.

Now I had cheesy gravy. Delightful.

I put the noodles in a dish, added the sausage, poured in my cheesy gravy, mixed it up, put the dish into the pre-heated to 350^oF oven, remembered the mixed veggies, pulled the dish out of the oven, added the mixed veggies, mixed it up, added a little bit of milk to help the veggies cook, and put the dish back into the oven for 30 minutes or so.

Ain't no shame. Ain't no shame at all.

1. Rombauer, Irma S. and Marion Rombauer Becker. Joy of Cooking. New York: Plume, 1973. Print