Matt objects to baked macaroni and cheese. I don’t, but I also don’t care all that much. If I don’t get to eat that kind, it’s fine. So finding good stovetop recipes is a plus for me, because most of the cool-looking or particularly delicious ones out there are oven-baked. And I know I’m Canadian and am therefore supposed to have a weird affinity for Kraft Dinner (hey, hey Americans, keep your pants on, it’s different from the American version, which is even named differently, “Kraft Macaroni and Cheese”), and I do, but liking something lo-fi like that does not prevent me from liking nice versions of the same thing.

I saw this recipe on Life’s Ambrosia, and maybe the number-one thing that made me want to save it immediately was that one of the three cheeses was Havarti. Loooove Havarti. In fact – and any high school friends reading this can confirm – during the nice weather parts of the year, a bunch of us routinely went down to the beach on a Friday afternoon with a slab of (supermarket) focaccia bread and some Havarti, and sand got in it but we didn’t care. We felt like classy … um… well, if you know me, you know what I was going to say here. Hi, people for whom I am keeping this blog PG-13! Indeed, after I made the macaroni and cheese and had most of the hunk of Havarti left over, I went to When Pigs Fly bakery and got some of this bread (which they have as a ciabatta on their website, but what I got was definitely a focaccia) to eat with it.

Um, where was I? Oh, right, cheeses… so yeah, the third cheese was Gruyere, and I thought that would be completely easy to find, but the grocery store didn’t have it! And I realize our grocery store isn’t super swankypants and I shouldn’t expect fancy cheese, but it is an allegedly Super Stop & Shop, so it has a cheese department. If you have a cheese department, it is not unreasonable to think it would be likely to have Gruyere, which isn’t even that out-there as cheeses go. But it did not. So we used provolone instead, which led to meatball subs later on in the week… not a bad trade-off, ultimately.

3-Cheese Macaroni and Cheese

Ingredients
1 cup dry macaroni
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp flour
3/4 cup milk
3/4 cup grated cheddar cheese
1/4 cup grated (or just chopped up really small – ours was sliced, and it’s impossible to grate a slice of cheese) provolone
1/4 cup finely chopped Havarti – who can grate a soft cheese like that, anyway?
1/2 tsp seasoning salt
a few hearty cranks of pepper
1 green onion, chopped

Method
Cook pasta according to package directions.
Take it out to drain, and leave it in the strainer while you do the next stuff.
In the same pot, melt the butter over medium heat.
Whisk in the flour until smooth.
Let it cook for 1 minute to get that raw flour taste out.
Whisk in the milk.
Bring to a simmer but not a real boil.
Dump in all the cheeses.
Stir until they are all melted.
Add salt and pepper.
Stir in the macaroni.
Cook 5 minutes.
Stir in the green onions.
Remove from the heat and let stand 5 minutes before serving.