Baked Macaroni and Cheese

For my brother-in-law's birthday, I baked my first macaroni and cheese as preferred by my sister, his wife. The original plan was to make the macaroni with tomato meat sauce but we went for the former as it was something new.

The recipe was from AllRecipes.com as usual and I must say that it turned out OK. I jazzed up the bechamel with clove-studded onions and avoided making it too savory for my sister by not simmering the sauce too long. I also made the mistake of adding the beaten eggs (I used two instead of one) early and the sauce thickened too quickly.

Unfortunately, this is one dish I cannot eat a lot of in one sitting as the flavor is consistently the same throughout. I find it doesn't have enough depth to keep me interested in a slice bigger than 2" x 2". So the entire pan stayed at my sister's where I hope they devoured it by now. The cooking size was pretty generous by my standards and I would not have been able to finish it on my own.

As for the original baked mac with tomato-meat sauce, I used the ingredients for pasta sauce and it's now chilling nicely in my fridge. This one I'm not sharing.

Salmon with Dill

I tried out this recipe from AllRecipes.com: Salmon with Dill.

It was simple enough and I happened to have everything in the fridge. It was the perfect choice for a short shrift dinner, but what a dynamite it turned out to be! I didn't follow the ingredients to the letter, however, preferring to use fresh minced red onion instead of powdered and dill seed instead of dill weed.

My oven is small---more like a toaster but roomier, so I had to use a relatively small baking dish. As a result, the salmon fillets (2 of them) had to rise up on the sides a bit and the spice rub gathered on the parts that lay flat. No surprise that the concentration of flavor was in the midsection of the fillets.

Still a good dinner. Here I thought I was bored with salmon, then came this recipe and I'm really into it again.