Mida’s Garlic Pickle

I have no idea if this product is available in the United States. I have never explored the supermarket’s tiny Indian section much at home, except to look for cheap jasmine rice and bagged peppercorns at Wegmans. But for once, I sincerely hope that something I discovered here will be there when I return home.

At Tesco here in Bratislava, there’s a sizable section of Indian foods, larger than that devoted to all of the rest of Asia put together. I don’t know that the Slovaks particularly like the cuisine of the subcontinent, but I do know that the British are fans. Tesco, as you might know, is based in Britain.

Browsing the shelves opposite where they now keep the ketchup and mustard one day, both Scott and I noticed this jar among the various chutneys and curry sauces.

Both being fans of garlic, we decided to give it a shot, despite its steep cost of about 115 korunas (that’s almost $5!).

At first, we didn’t quite know what to do with it. It was all right in sandwiches and on baked potatoes, but it wasn’t spectacular. We had to wonder if we’d made the right choice in buying it.

But then! I was mixing up some sort of salad or defrosted-vegetable side dish one day, and I decided to flavor it with the garlic pickle. Success!

This stuff totally transforms a bowl of plain veggies, adding zing in a way butter never could. The saucy part adds warm but not hot spice and some acidity, and the garlic slivers give you a sweet-hot garlic bite without the knockout punch of raw garlic.

I add a tablespoon or two of the pickle to almost any frozen veggie I want to quickly jazz up (such as green beans or broccoli). It’s also great made into a salad dressing. Chunk up cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions (and maybe toss in a rinsed can of kidney beans), add a little salt, a splash of vinegar, and a few spoonfuls of garlic pickle, and you have the most delicious quick side dish this side of French fries.

Patak’s might make something similar among all its jarred Indian goodies. I use the nutritional stats on something called “Patak’s Garlic Relish” when counting calories for a dish. I’m hoping that it’s simply another name for this wonderful condiment that has been totally worth the $5.

A Little Bit of Christmas Eve Fun

Test your international holiday food knowledge over at AOL.

I got a 10 out of 10, but it helped that I live in Slovakia and have more exposure right now to a number of the quiz items. I even saw advocaat at the store a week or so ago.

via Slashfood

Fat with a Side of Fat . . . Mmm

We’re making the trek to Ikea today, which means we’ll be having lunch on the cheap in the Ikea restaurant.

What’s Ikea like in Slovakia? Swedish.

The Ikea restaurant does make concessions to local language and culture in a way that the general store never seems to. Sure, you can still get their “Swedish specialties,” like that traditional Ikea plate of 10 meatballs with gravy, potatoes, and a dollop of lingonberry jam. But tucked away among the many salmon with dill dishes is a plate that’s a favorite of the Slovak people: fried cheese with French fries and tartar sauce.

I think that’s something like “vyblahblah syr” with “hranolky” and “tartar omácka.” I’m pretty sure I got that right.

When you say “omácka,” make sure to smack your lips on the “ch” phoneme (I know I’m missing some sort of diacritical mark that English keyboards don’t make) because sauce is yummy.

You have to have some way to remember the collections of consonants over here, after all.

Anyway, I’m not sure what cheese is used in fried cheese here. It’s definitely not mozzarella like you’d get in stick form in America. And it’s not bryndza (I’m sure I got that right), the only Slovak cheese I know, because that’s a very soft, sheep’s milk cheese. Scott might have told me what he thought it was, but if he did I heard something like “fsihal” and promptly forgot.

It’s definitely a pretty mild cheese that doesn’t melt much, which did remind me of the Greek halloumi cheese that Amy Sedaris wrote about and that I saw Bobby Flay grill outdoors on television. At any rate, it holds its shape nicely a breaded rectangle about two-and-a-half inches wide and four inches long.

That is to say, about 6.35 centimeters wide and 10.16 centimeters long.

The hranolky that come with it are your standard-issue frozen French fries, which are plenty popular here as potatoes in general seem to be. The national dish is potato dumplings with bryndza and bacon, after all.

There is an interesting phenomenon in this country of “American potatoes,” though. American potatoes seem to be potatoes cut into wedges and fried or roasted or somehow cooked and doused in a seasoning blend. In fact, I have a can of “Americky the-word-potato-in-Slovak” seasoning in the kitchen now that I add to my Cincinnati chili because of how sweet it is.

Still. Slovaks, I had never seen nor heard of “American potatoes” until I came to Slovakia. Thank you for educating me in the ways of my culture.

But back to the point, because I haven’t ruminated on tartar sauce yet.

I don’t think I ever had tartar sauce in my life before coming here. In the United States, of course, tartar sauce is inextricably linked to fish, and I wouldn’t touch a fish plate with a 41-foot pole (because then I might be in close enough proximity to smell it).

Here though — here, tartar sauce is to Slovaks what ketchup is to Americans and what mayonnaise is to Francophones. They put it on everything! It’s hard to say whether it’s included on Ikea’s plate more for the fried cheese or the French fries.

And herein lies the one major change in my cooking that has been effected (yes, effected with an “e” here) so far by the experience of living abroad: I now use tartar sauce all the time. I’ve made halusky (I totally think that’s how it’s spelled) only once, and I’ve never tried my hand at palacinky (though I’ve made and set myself aflame making similar-enough crepes in the past), but tartar sauce has made its way into my sandwiches, potato salad, and pimento cheese.

And so I present to you, America: tartar sauce. It’s not just for fish anymore. It’s savory, salty-tangy goodness is a shortcut that will save you from having to try to find sour pickles in countries that don’t seem to offer them.

It’s the new ketchup with your hranolky. Bonsko appetitsky!

Pasta Sauce as a Condiment (In the Ketchup Sense)

Generally, I don’t bother with jarred sauce for pasta. True, I do pick up a jar if I’m looking for alfredo — I’m currently not that great at making cheese sauces anyway, but I also don’t care for the effort involved except for special occasions. For example, one time, I sat in the tiny communal kitchen for our residence hall’s first floor for about an hour nursing a special blue cheese alfredo that needed constant stirring. Needless to say, my care led to me boiling rather than the sauce, but it was tasty. And for a special occasion.

Nevertheless, sometimes it’s handy to have a jar of tomato-based sauce on hand to use for seasoning other dishes (it’s great with scrambled eggs) or making a quick lunch (mmm, pizza sandwiches). For such a task, I don’t want to lay out eight or 10 bucks for a fancy concoction with a celebrated name attached, but nor do I want to be super cheap and get a very smooth, flavorless sauce when the goal is to add interest to my dishes.

I’ve found that Barilla’s pasta sauce is a good compromise. The Basilico featured here that I found at Tesco (I’m sorry, the page is in German — just be glad it’s not in Slovak) is wonderfully chunky, with tons of huge hunks of tomato throughout. It’s neither sweet nor bitter, like a lot of jarred sauce. In fact, with all those chunks, it tastes mostly of ripe tomato, with enough seasoning to earn the term “sauce.”

It’s not bad for you, either. A half-cup serving has 70 calories, three grams of fiber, two grams of fat (which is good as fat makes more nutrients in the tomato available to your body), and only eight grams of sugar. I don’t even use half a cup per serving myself for the ways I use jarred sauce, either, so it’s a calorically cheap way for me to flavor my meals.

Now, I still have nothing against my old standby, Hunt’s sauce in a can. I still think if you’re the sort of person who prefers to get prepared spaghetti sauce rather than making your own, you can’t go wrong with this stuff. Most jarred sauce is terrible, anyway, and I can’t even tell you how Barilla’s sauce is on pasta as I don’t use it for that application. Hunt’s is easy to jazz up with a can of diced tomatoes and some garlic, making it a gateway to trying your hand at homemade sauce. Oh, and it’s super-cheap — great for college students.

Barilla’s Puttanesca sauce, which I’ve tried in America, is pretty good, too, by the way. If you’re not up to making puttanesca on your own, it’s worth picking up. It’s chock full of both black and green olives, and thus an excellent change of pace from the usual chunky pasta sauce.

Watching Those Calories

We’ve been using CalorieKing’s software for months now to track our food and calorie intake. In case you missed those review entries, we’re talking about a food diary program that uses a nutritional database to quantify what your eat and that helps you track progress toward your diet goals. Also, as it happens, it’s useful for drawing conclusions about what actions help you to stick to the weight-loss plan.

For us, it really seems to all be about the quality of our breakfasts, lunches, and snacks. Keeping those meals healthy and low-cal gives us a lot more freedom for our main meal of the day, dinner.

For example, on a typical day, we eat a breakfast of cold cereal or oatmeal. Since we stick to low-sugar varieties and use skim milk, these are also low-calorie meals. We start the day with a meal that clocks in under 200 calories, but the fiber in the cereal keeps us feeling full until lunch.

The takeaway? Invest in high-fiber breakfast foods such as oatmeal, Cheerios, bran-based cereals, Fiber One (Hungry Girl always recommends that one), etc., to start the day full.

Alternatively, if you prefer protein-based breakfasts, stretch a 74-calorie large egg by scrambling in low-cal veggies and egg whites (a large one is only 17 calories!).

Lunch for us usually means sandwiches or soups (for Scott, sometimes both). We naturally tend to eat a smaller portion of soup at lunch than at dinner, usually just one or two one-cup bowlfuls. For sandwiches, we keep the calorie counts low by sticking to low-fat lunchmeats (chicken, turkey, and lean ham rather than salami or loads of bacon) and low-calorie spreads such as spicy brown mustard, light mayo, and light tartar sauce.

We skip the accompaniment of chips that I at least grew up with and is often seen at delis. If we have a side, it’s fruit or leftover veggies from dinner.

It is a long wait from lunch until dinner having only eaten two light meals, true. That’s why we try to stock healthy snacks to eat mid-afternoon. Right now, we have apples, almonds, low-fat cottage cheese, light cheese wedges, and pretzel twists. Bananas are especially filling, too.

On the other hand, those pretzel twists really don’t satisfy your hunger for a 100-calorie handful — I buy them to satisfy salt cravings. I find that it’s important to satisfy a craving as soon as possible because if I wait too long, my willpower crashes and I overindulge. Makes sense in a way, as it appears that using willpower saps your body of energy.

We don’t miss scads of extras at breakfast or lunch because in American culture, the main meal is dinner. Thus, we expect a big meal at suppertime, and it’s then that we feel deprived if we have to cut back. Of course, in countries like Slovakia where lunch is the main meal, you could follow the same basic plan, just changing around which meals are the extra-light ones.

At dinner, I tend to cook just about anything that I can make into a relatively healthy dish (moderation, moderation), and we feel free to eat larger portions knowing that we’ve been good so far. We are able to indulge in some homemade hamburgers, thus keeping us from going deprivation-crazy, without derailing our diet.

Of course, I do accompany the hamburgers or whatever the main dish may be with lots of seasoned vegetables and salads rather than French fries to keep things healthy, but still — it’s a triumph to know that we can feel OK eating the macaroni and cheese in the first place.

Steak Bites with Bloody Mary Dipping Sauce

Happy Halloween! Here in Slovakia Land (I made that up), Halloween’s really more an All Hallows Eve; that is, it’s the night before All Saints Day, which is apparently a huge holiday here.

At home, the only sign that it was All Saints Day was that we were whisked off to church the morning after trick-or-treating for the holy day of obligation. Surely the priests and other religious out there were taking special care to pray for the poor children’s souls post-mischief, but otherwise no one seemed to celebrate.

Here, the tradition is closer to how Mexico celebrates Día de los Muertos, with families trekking off to the cemetery to decorate graves, according to Scott, the resident Slovakia expert.

While there were a few bits of Halloween decoration available at Tesco today (it’s an English chain, after all), they were well overshadowed by the bouquets of flowers available for the coming day. The perfume in the air was overwhelming.

Still, Scott and I chose to keep with our American traditions for the night, and I put together a ghoulish meal, soon to be followed by some candy indulgence.

On the menu this evening: Worms and Maggots (soy sauced-spaghetti with white beans), Toilet-Papered Trees (broccoli with strips of white cheese draped artfully about), Vampire-Scaring Garlic Breadsticks (from the Tesco bakery), and some Bloody Steak.

I’ve made Rachael Ray’s Steak Bites with Bloody Mary Sauce in the past, and originally I did cut the beef into cubes. They turned out pretty tough; I don’t know if that was from overcooking (likely with such small pieces) or from ending up with a gristly cut of meat. At any rate, I took no chances this time. I scrupulously removed any white bits and membranes from the steaks and left them whole so I would be less likely to overcook.

I also poked them several times with my knife tip to be extra sure of tenderness as I had no idea what part of the cattle I had ended up with. The only cut we could identify in the beef cooler was the one labeled in English “rump steak.” So we just picked based on what looked decent.

Anyway, here is the recipe for the main course. You can replace the vodka all or in part with water. And after all the holiday celebrations, perhaps I will get caught up with the Recipes of the Day!

Steak Bites with Bloody Mary Sauce
Source: Rachael Ray
Yield: 6 servings

• 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for drizzling
• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• ½ cup vodka
• 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
• 2 teaspoons hot pepper sauce
• 1 cup tomato sauce
• 1 tablespoon rounded prepared horseradish
• Salt and pepper
• 1 ⅓ lbs. beef sirloin cut into large bite-sized pieces, 1 by 2 inches
• Steak seasoning blend or coarse salt and black pepper
• 6 to 8 inch bamboo skewers

Heat a small saucepan over medium heat. Add oil and onions and saute 5 minutes. Add vodka and reduce by 1/2. Add Worcestershire, hot sauce, tomato sauce and horseradish. Stir to combine the dipping sauce and return the sauce to a bubble. Add salt and pepper and adjust seasonings.

Heat nonstick skillet over high heat. Coat meat bites lightly in oil. Season with steak seasoning blend or salt and pepper, to taste. Cook the meat until caramelized all over, about 2 minutes on each side. Transfer dipping sauce to a small dish and place at the center of a serving platter. Surround the dip with meat bites and set several bamboo “stakes” or skewers along side meat.

Download Steak Bites with Bloody Mary Dipping Sauce into MacGourmet.

Tip File: Salads as Nutritional Spackle

I read so much about wonderful, highly nutritious foods we should all be eating every day. A half cup of beans, a bowl of oatmeal, a handful of nuts — in fact, it often seems nuts how much food we’re expected to consume daily and yet still keep the calorie count low.

 

With so many obligation foods out there, where do I fit in my pizza and grilled cheese?

 

Aside from wanting to satisfy my cravings for what’s bad for me, there is the problem of just where to fit in all those magical foods that will make us so much healthier. I can’t serve dark, leafy greens as the main course every night.

 

That’s where some sneakiness needs to come in, I think. I know parents have a tendency to disguise good-for-us vegetables under blankets of cheese or grated to oblivion in sauce, but that’s a topic for another time.

 

What I’m thinking of is tricking our adult selves into consuming more of the nutritious foods that are often missing in our diets without shunting aside our favorite main courses.

 

My top method for accomplishing this is incorporating the foods into side salads.

 

Maybe you didn’t grow up with a salad as a side dish every day, but my mom started providing salad at nearly every evening meal about the time those bagged mixes started showing up in the produce department in our hometown. It took me a while to overcome my aversion to lettuce as a child, but my tastebuds have most definitely grown out of it. I’ve now become accustomed to having a salad to accompany my dinner most nights, and I consider it a sign of a good-value restaurant if they throw me one before my entrée arrives.

 

Here in Slovakia, I continued the tradition, generally tossing some lettuce with tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions, maybe some radishes if I felt ambitious. I got a bagged salad mix with iceberg lettuce, grated carrots, and shredded cabbage.

 

But lately, I’ve been taking advantage of that daily salad to sneak in some extra nutrition in something I’m going to be eating anyway.

 

Now, due to nutritional issues, cost, and the fact that my bagged mixes here were going bad within a day or two, I make all our salads with that dark green, romaine lettuce. If you’re in the United States, you can up the dark-greens content of your salad by tossing in some baby spinach as well.

 

Also, I started adding drained and rinsed canned beans to our salads every night. This adds protein and fiber to our diets, two things I noticed we were generally lacking in. Plus, the fiber in beans can help reduce cholesterol levels over time.

 

Another trick I’ve read about is to add a small portion of nuts to your salad each night. This strategy could replace the crunch I’ve missed since giving up croutons (sniff!), along with providing nuts’ vitamins, minerals, and good fats in doses smaller than you’d be tempted to consume when snacking.

 

Or at least what I’d be tempted to consume should someone place a bowl of roasted, salted almonds in front of me.

 

Salads can also accommodate fruit, but if you go this route, stick to fresh fruits such as diced apples, orange wedges, and strawberries (tasty with balsamic vinegar!). Dried fruits often have added sugar and, if nothing else, provide more calories than fresh fruit per given volume since all the bulk-adding water’s been sucked out.

 

Of course, it’s important to mix in your garden-variety salad vegetables as well. Tomatoes and carrots (I now keep a bag of the pre-shredded sort on hand) are nutritional powerhouses themselves. Cucumbers help make you feel full because of their high water content, leading you to consume less of a perhaps naughtier main dish.

 

Salads aren’t the only solution. At some point, I’ve got to add an entry here about using desserts to fill nutritional holes in your diet. Pizzas, sandwiches, and other less than healthy foods as well. But salads, if you generally eat them with your dinner, are an easy start.

 

Now that you’ve packed your salad bowl with all this good stuff, there’s no need to ruin it by drowning it in ranch dressing (I know what you like, America). Stick to the light versions of bottled dressing, switch to Salad Spritzers, drizzle on straight balsamic vinegar, or try some homemade dressing. Below is a recipe for a delicious sweet and spicy dressing Scott and I came up with while trying to duplicate Catalina for his mom’s taco salad.

 

Fat-Free Taco Salad Dressing
Source: Colleen Fischer (with inspiration from a number of Catalina dressing recipes online)
Yield: 13 two-tablespoon servings

 

• ½ cup vinegar
• ½ cup ketchup
• 1 tablespoon taco seasoning
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ¼ teaspoon pepper
• 1 onion, grated

 

Whisk all ingredients together in a small bowl or mix in a blender. Serve or store in a dressing cruet.

 

NUTRITION FACTS
Servings: 13
Amount Per Serving
Calories: 18
Total Fat: 0.11g
Cholesterol: –
Sodium: 198mg
Total Carbs: 4.22g
Dietary Fiber: –
Protein: 0.29g

Download Fat-Free Taco Salad Dressing into MacGourmet.

Green Giant Frozen Sauced Vegetables

Aside from junk food, which I shouldn’t be eating anyway, these veggies could be the American grocery products I miss the most here in Slovakia.

 

I was definitely a picky eater as a kid. Scott is growing increasingly incredulous as I describe how for years I wouldn’t touch pizza, hamburgers, or raw tomatoes. (Actually, one or two of those he might not know until now that I used to refuse. The list is long.)

 

I do blame genetics in part, by the way. My mom still won’t eat most cheese or nuts, and neither my mom nor my dad has never cared for Mexican food.

 

Still, I got over most of my childhood neophobia. Over the years, I’ve tried to chip away my reluctance to eat many different vegetables. I’ve started to eat more carrots and broccoli (and I long ago began eating tomatoes again), for example. Over the years, I’ve worked more and more greens into my salads, including baby spinach. I’m currently working on cauliflower and squash.

 

In fact, I’ve come to love many new vegetables over the years, and I routinely add them to main courses to fill them out and put a second bowl out as a side dish, in addition to the usual dinner salad.

 

These Green Giant vegetable blends with sauce helped me a lot with coming to like vegetables such as broccoli over the past couple of years. And even though I now like the vegetables in most of the blends on their own, I still love how the sauces add easy interest to a side dish.

 

And did I mention they are generally low-cal and delicious?

 

My favorite is the simple broccoli with cheese sauce. If you live alone, like I did in Vegas, this particular blend comes in convenient single-serving packages. That way, you don’t have to count out sauce chips to heat up a single portion from the big bag.

 

But even if you aren’t living alone, those 60-calories broccoli cups make a delicious quick snack.

 

The buttered corn comes in single-serving packs, too, but I prefer to save some calories by just spritzing a little butter spray on regular frozen corn.

 

In addition to the mixed veggie blends, I greatly enjoy the bags with roasted potatoes in along with the veggies. They’re slightly more indulgent as a side dish, so portion the main accordingly.

 

And hey — if you’re looking for a filling frozen meal without a ton of calories, try making any of the pasta and vegetable blends your main dish. It’s like easy pasta primavera.

 

What I love about these bags is that they combine indulgent flavors with amazingly low calorie counts, so you don’t have to feel at all guilty about eating as much of the side dish as you want. Mmmmm!

 

Cottage Cheese Mac

I have a secret shame.

 

I love macaroni and cheese from the blue box.

 

Okay, nowadays I prefer the blue box that says “Deluxe” to the original Cheese and Macaroni, but nonetheless, I truly enjoy elbows or shells coated in a processed cheese sauce.

 

Velveeta Shells and Cheese, Kraft Deluxe, Annie’s — it doesn’t matter which. As long as it comes with a packet of cheesy goo, it’s okay with me!

 

Although, come to think of it, the boxes with powder have their merits, too. When the grocery budget has dwindled, those 50-cent meals look mighty appetizing. Plus with the powder kind you have more control over how much fat goes into the sauce (always skim milk and skimpy butter).

 

Of course, I do have a reasonable argument for my dependence on packaged mac and cheese. It’s simple.

 

All recipes for the homemade stuff I’ve ever tried suck. Big time.

 

Alton Brown’s casserole is mostly flavorless and often comes out grainy (although it is tasty when deep fried). Paula Deen’s baked mac is greasy, clumpy, and again, mostly flavorless. These are the two most prominent disasters in my memory, but no recipe I’ve tried has produced results that could compete with the boxed stuff for punch. Rather, they taste as insipid as the Stouffer’s frozen cheesy mac my mom stocked before I could cook for myself.

 

Obviously, we’re coming in a roundabout way now to the recipe that is the exception to the rule.

 

I found a recipe that called for incorporating cottage cheese and sour cream into macaroni and cheese on Art Smith’s Back to the Table blog at Yahoo Food.

 

Now, as I am in Slovakia for the next several months, I had to improvise a bit with this recipe. Cheddar cheese is pricey in these parts; for the same price you can can two to four times as much Edam, Gouda or Emmentaler. Also, everything is measured in metric over here, so I can buy cottage cheese in either 180-gram or 150-gram tubs; no cups or ounces.

 

I decided too that I wanted to add a bit of one of my favorite flavors to the sauce, so I picked up one tub of cottage cheese with chives along with a plain tub. The herbal flecks made the finished dish look a bit prettier, as it turned out.

 

This mac and cheese came at me with knock-my-socks-off flavor. Yum, yum, yum! I think the extra acidity from the sour cream and cottage cheese helped kick the cheesy flavor up, and the touch of chives added some interest to a normally bland dish.

 

Some tips now.

 

Here, I am kind of stuck with whatever’s on the shelves as far as dairy goes. Reduced-fat blocks of cheese don’t seem to exist. Products aren’t required to have nutritional information, so often they don’t. Also, whereas in America you might be offered sour cream in nonfat, low-fat, and full-fat varieties, here you are likely only to find one type (and hopefully you pick up the soured “smotana” as opposed to the fresh-from-the-cow kind, which come in pretty much the same packages).

 

Thus, I suggest making this a healthier dish if you live somewhere with a variety of dairy products by subbing in lower-cal versions. I myself usually like to go the middle-of-the-road low-fat route. The nutrition stats in the recipe, though, are for the highest fat products you might use.

 

In addition, go ahead and take a page from the Volumetrics diet — stir in some warmed veggie mix from the freezer to stretch the dish, increasing the nutrients but reducing the calories per serving. You’ll feel full on less cheese that way. For lunch the next day, I stirred in the leftover peas, corn, and carrots from dinner, and it was lovely.

 

Finally, don’t give up if it looks like the cheese is not melting right away. It takes several minutes of stirring to get those cottage cheese curds to meld with the sauce, but trust me, they will eventually.

 

Cottage Cheese Mac
Source: Colleen Fischer
Yield: 6 servings

• 2 cups elbow macaroni, (about 7 ounces)
  
• 1 large egg, beaten
  
• 1 cup cottage cheese
  
• 1 cup cottage cheese with chives
  
• ¾ cup sour cream
  
• 1 teaspoon table salt, plus more for the macaroni water
  
• ½ teaspoon garlic powder
  
• ½ teaspoon ground black pepper
  
• 1 ½ cups Emmentaler cheese, shredded (about 7 ounces)
  

Boil a large pot of water. Add salt to taste and the macaroni. Cook until just before al dente, as the pasta will cook more in the cheese sauce.

Meanwhile, mix the egg, cottage cheeses, sour cream, salt, garlic powder, and pepper thoroughly in a medium bowl. Stir in the shredded cheese.

Drain the macaroni and return it to the hot pot, off the heat. Add the cheese mixture to the pot and fold it in with a rubber spatula. Return the pot to the burner over low heat, stirring gently and constantly for about 5 minutes, or until the shredded cheese and almost all of the cottage cheese melts. This will also gently cook the egg in the sauce. Don’t rush it — too much heat will not yield a nice, creamy sauce!

Take the pot off the heat and allow it to sit for about 5 minutes to thicken. Serve warm.

Download Cottage Cheese Mac into MacGourmet.