Leek, spinach, and peas mac and cheese
Keyword stuffing AND ingredient(s) stuffing!
Hello, my name is Apoorva Sripathi and I’m a writer and editor. This week’s paid subscriber newsletter is a recipe for a verdant mac and cheese, topped with crispy onions – I hope you’ll give it a go. If you’d like to support my work, please consider a paid subscription, it means a lot. Thank you!
No one needs a recipe for mac and cheese right now. This is what I’m telling myself as I’ve been thumbing through photos on my phone as evidence of what I’ve cooked recently (for myself first and then the newsletter). However, it turned out great, it felt like a feast. Yet I don’t know how to convince people to make this dish. Still, here are my thoughts on why you should make this: [it] makes for an excellent main course – should you invite people over, there is a lot of it to go around. It is sustaining and virtuous (spinach and peas!!). It is also excellent for when you have a drunk partner/friend/flatmate stumbling home saying, “I’m hungry, I can eat anything.”
But this isn’t just anything; it is a small project involving thawing some veg, making a béchamel, cooking diminutive macaroni, grating cheese, and putting it all together in a ceramic dish that most represents you1.
The way the world looks, everything can be fraught with difficulty. I don’t think it has to be that way though, because cooking is an act of creating: hope, happiness, promise, future. And making something with your hands (for yourself or someone else) that takes time and demands care, which eventually remakes oneself and one’s relationship to their community is a wondrous thing. I think greens have the ability to do that, to guide us towards nourishment. You do not need much culinary prowess! You just need to have fun with it. Mix up the proportions, go wild with substitutions, top it all with cheese and onion, and invite some friends. Let it get messy.