Pizza Panda Style

Let's just come right out and address the fact that there was no post last week. You know why? Because everything went totally and completely wrong in my kitchen, that's why. I broke the new photostudio thingum (Mr P fixed it), burned the chicken (which wasn't really thawed anyway) and just generally screwed everything up. And yeah, I could have written it up as a "don't do any of this" kind of post, but I've been so tired I couldn't be bothered. I hope you're not feeling too neglected.

This week, I'm still really tired, and I'm sick. Again. Rather than leave the dust gathering on this blog experiment though, I've got a guest cook this week! Mr. Panda made us some homemade pizza! In fact, he did such a good job y'all might want him permanently instead of me. Well. Too bad. But you get him this week! Enjoy!

:::Mr. Panda Enters Stage Left:::

Pizza.  What image does the word conjure in your mind?  Cardboard boxes that arrive at your door in 30 minutes or less?  Late night fuel for college study sessions?  The inevitable thin crust "soda and a slice" so beloved by New Yorkers?  Whatever it is, I'm willing to bet that it represents convenience and simplicity.  Today, Yours Truly, Mr. Panda, brings to you the anti-pizza.  Neither convenient nor simple.  But gosh-darned tasty.

When Mrs. P asked me to provide a pizza-based blog post, I knew I wanted to try something new.  I knew I needed to provide something that the thousands of readers of Not Just Bamboo would approve of.  As a man who worships at the altar of Mr. Alton Brown, I immediately hied me to my copy of Good Eats: The Early Years for suitable recipes (a present from the lovely Mrs. P and a cookbook I can't endorse enough, btw).  I found two to provide the foundation of the pizza adventure: Pizza Pizza dough and tomato sauce.

The pizza dough calls for an 18-24 hour rise time, so this is the perfect meal to prep everything the day before and then just pop it in the oven the day of.  In my case, I prepared the pizza dough and the tomato sauce ahead of time and did the pizza toppings the next day right before baking.  In retrospect, I would have done everything the night before.  Tip # 1: from me to you.

I'm going to present this process in the actual order I went through it: make the sauce, make the dough, make the toppings, bake the pizza.  A more talented and coordinated cook (such as you, Gentle Reader) could no doubt have done several of these tasks all at once.

Day 1, Step 1: The Sauce!


I've never made sauce from scratch before, so this was an experiment conducted entirely for your amusement.

First, gather the ingredients:

We, who are about to become tomato sauce, salute you!

• 2 (28-ounce) cans whole, peeled tomatoes
• 1/4 cup sherry vinegar
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon red pepper flakes (I omitted these for Mrs. P's sake)
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1 teaspoon dried basil
• 1 onion
• 1 carrot
• 1 stalk celery (I hate celery, so I also omitted these)
• 2 ounces olive oil
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 tablespoons capers, rinsed and drained
• 1/2 cup white wine
• Kosher salt and black pepper, to taste

Strain the tomatoes over a large saucepan, setting the tomatoes aside to use later.  Add the vinegar, sugar and spices to the tomato juice and bring to a boil.  Once the surface starts to bubble, reduce heat and simmer uncovered until it loses about half its liquid content.

Liquid on the stove: ready, set, simmer!

While the liquid is cooking, dice the carrots and onions and put them in a roasting pan, along with the tomatoes, olive oil, capers and garlic (this is apparently known as a mirepoix in cooking circles).  Place the roasting pan on a rack in the middle of the oven under the broiler for 15-20 minutes (mine broiled for 20 minutes), stirring every 5 minutes, until the tomatoes have started to caramelize and brown on the outside.  Don't cheese out on the roasting!  I believe this process is what really gives the sauce its depth of flavor.

Roasted mirepoix goodness

 Be careful here - after coming out of the broiler, the pan is really freakin' hot.  Take the liquid off the heat and carefully add the mirepoix.  Stir in the wine and, voila, sauce!  Now, Alton claims that you can use this sauce at different consistencies for different foods.  I don't know about that, but I do know that if you blend it all the way down it becomes perfect for pizza.

Using a blender (I used Mrs. P's awesome Cuisinart hand blender), blend to an appropriate consistency for pizza sauce.  Let the sauce cool and place in the refrigerator for tomorrow's pizza extravaganza.  Note: this makes waaay more sauce than you need for pizza.  Alton says it freezes for up to a year.  We now have two freezer bags full of leftover sauce in our freezer.  Who knows?  It may show up back here on the blog as part of a future project.

Homemade pizza sauce is home made

Day 1, Step 2: The Dough 


This dough is, as they say in Boston, wicked easy.  First, gather the ingredients together:

• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 tablespoon kosher salt*
• 1 tablespoon pure olive oil
• 3/4 cup warm water
• 2 cups flour (Alton's original recipe called for 9.5 ounces by weight - wtf???)
• 1 teaspoon instant yeast

Place all ingredients in a stand mixer bowl.  Mix on low with the flat beater until it just becomes a ball.  Next, attach the dough hook and need on medium for 15 minutes.  Tear off a small piece of dough to test for proper consistency.  If it stretches to translucency prior to breaking, the dough is ready.  If not, knead for 5 - 10 more minutes.

Roll the dough into a ball and place in a bowl.  Pour two teaspoons of olive oil over the dough and spread it around to coat.  Cover the bowl with plastic wrap (or an eco-friendly lid if you happen to have one) and place in the refrigerator to rise for 18-24 hours.

One note of caution here: our refrigerator runs very cold at the top.  I put the dough on the top shelf and when I took it out on Day 2 it was near-freezing temperature and hadn't risen at all.  I recommend placing it somewhere in your refrigerator with a more moderate temperature to give the yeast a chance to be active.

Day 2, Step 3: The Toppings


Ahhh... the toppings.  While dough and sauce are the foundation of a pizza, the toppings are what really defines it.  For this pizza, we opted to do sweet Italian sausage, mushrooms and mozzarella cheese.  I really like the flavor of sweet Italian sausage and I think it lends itself exceptionally well to pizza.  You, of course, are welcome to try any toppings you think appropriate.  Since this is my blog post, though, you get to read about sweet Italian sausage, mushrooms and mozzarella.

Oh sweet Italian sausage, how I do love thee

To prepare the sausage, I used a technique I learned whilst living among the sausage-loving peoples of upstate New York.  I bought the best sweet sausage I could find and used a knife to split the casings.  The meat inside the casing can be put in a frying pan and browned like ground beef or loose ground sausage.  While browning the sausage, Mrs. P made a most brilliant suggestion and I put the sliced mushrooms in with the sausage to saute in the sausage grease.

Cook the combination, stirring to brown the sausage and keep it from burning.  Remove from heat when the sausage is brown (the mushrooms will bake on the pizza).  In retrospect, a larger pan is better, but the outcome in my case was still exceptionally tasty.

Sausage/mushroom saute

Three words on cheese: I love cheese.  A few more: get good mozzarella and shred a pile of it for use as a pizza topping.  That's really all there is to cheese on the pizza.  (Okay, full disclosure: I used pre-shredded cheese for this pizza.  It still tasted good, but I didn't respect myself in the morning.)

Day 2, Step 4: Putting it all together (or, a pile of stuff becomes a pizza)


To properly cook a pizza, it should be cooked in a brick oven at something like 800 degrees.  If you happen to have one of those I hate you (that's the jealousy talking) and you can skip to the end because you already know what you're doing.  If you're a mere mortal and making due with a regular oven, you'll have to improvise.  Alton has actual tiles he uses to line his oven to create a faux-brick oven.  I haven't reached his level of geek Nirvana yet so I use an ordinary Pampered Chef pizza stone (mine is old, though, so it doesn't have handles).  Put your stone in the oven and preheat it as high as it will go.  Mine goes to 550 degrees, so that's what I got.  Warning note: put the stone in the cold oven and then preheat to make sure you don't break your stone due to thermal shock.

While the oven is preheating, take the dough out, split it into two equal-sized balls and let it rest.  Actually, you should do this very first, since the dough needs to rest for about 30 minutes.  Take one of the dough balls and place it on a lightly floured pizza peel.  Press it into a disc, creating a lip on the edge.  The lip will become the outer crust of the pizza.

Now for the fun part: stretching the dough.  Rolling pizza dough is just unsat.  The dough won't taste right, the outer crust won't form, and it wouldn't be pizza.  Real pizza dough is stretched to reach the right proportions.  There are several methods to do this.  You can stretch it by hand on the pizza peel.  You can pick it up, run it through your fingers and rotate it to let gravity stretch it.  Or, you can use the magic of centrifugal force to stretch the dough by spinning it and throwing it in the air.  Clearly, that last is the way to go.  Come on, people - centrifugal force!

Okay, so... here is the point in the narrative where you would rightfully expect a beautiful picture or video of me twirling pizza dough in the air.  Sadly, this is not to be. We tried; we really did.  Instead of pizza twirling, we have a considerable library of pictures of our kitchen cabinets and open air conspicuously free of twirling pizza dough.  We aim to please here at Not Just Bamboo, though, so in lieu of pictures of the actual event, we scoured the internet and found this video, which is a pretty close reenactment of my pizza twirling performance:

Once you've stretched your pizza dough, now it's time to turn it into pizza.  Place the dough on your peel and apply the pizza sauce.  Use a ladle to place a cupful or so in the middle of the dough and then spread it around.  The goal is to get an even layer of sauce over all the crust.

Pizza sauce and ladle

Time for toppings!  Top the pizza with the sausage and mushrooms.  Take the shredded mozzarella and sprinkle it over the toppings.  There's no science to this.  Put as many toppings as seem right and top with as much cheese as you think you want.  Finally, brush a little olive oil over the edge of the crust.

Transfer the pizza from the pizza peel to the stone in the oven.  Alton had some suggestions on how to do this.  It was still a messy transaction for me.  Hopefully, your dough isn't stuck to your peel and you can put the edge of the peel against the back of the stone and just give it a couple jiggles and a quick snap back to put it on the stone.  I have faith in you - you're smarter than me and you'll figure this out.

Bake in the oven for 7 minutes or so.  You want the dough to be golden brown and cheese bubbly.  Keep an eye on the dough, it might bubble.  If it does, pop the bubbles with a fork.

Once the pizza is done, slide your peel under it and pull it out of the oven.  And that's it!  Perfect pizza.

Trust me - it's awesome

This recipe makes enough dough for two pizzas.  If you're hungry enough to eat both, then make them right away.  If not, I highly recommend keeping the second ball of dough in the refrigerator (it should keep for 6 days) and only baking it when you're ready.  The toppings, cheese, sauce, etc should all last just fine as long as the dough.  This pizza is really really good when it's fresh.  It's okay as a leftover, but if you have the luxury of making it fresh - why not?

Happy pizza-ing!

Is it French Toast?

I'm not really sure where to start on the recipe I made this week. It was delicious, it was easy, and I'm glad I made it. But I set out to make some kind of French toast- in fact I used a recipe that called itself French toast - and while eating it realized, "Hey. You know what? This is bread pudding."

The Panda Sister came for a visit last weekend, which is why I chose to make something rather luscious and yummy. Let's get one thing straight, whether this is French toast or bread pudding, this recipe is not something you want to make for your Uncle Morty with the cholesterol problems. Eggs, cream, butter- all in abundance. I have some ideas for adding fruit, but that's not going to counter 8 eggs, ya know?

Let's leave figuring out exactly what this is for later. For now, here's how it went in the Panda Kitchen (ha! totally sounds like a Chinese food takeout, no?).

8 eggs (seriously)
2 cups milk
1 loaf French Bread or Challah
1/4 cup heavy whipping cream
1/4 cup Irish Cream liquor
3/4 cup sugar
2 tablespoons vanilla extract

Start off by spraying a baking pan with non-stick spray. Cut the bread into even cubes or pieces spread evenly through the pan.

Meanwhile mix together the eggs, milk, cream, sugar, liquor and vanilla. Make sure you really mix the sugar in, because in my experience it formed a bit of a stubborn sludge at the bottom of the bowl. Pour the egg mixture over the bread, cover, stick in the fridge. Best if you have a few hours or even overnight to let all the bread pieces absorb the custard.

Now get to work on the cinnamon topping, which let's not even lie, is what we're all here for.

1/2 flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 salt
1/2 cup butter

Mix all the dry ingredients together, then cut the butter a little bit at a time into the mix. The original recipe says use a fork for this, and that'll work, but if you have a pastry cutter even better. Hey, sometimes a specialist kitchen tool really does make all the difference. Keep mixing until you can't see any of the butter and the mix is the color of wet sand. You can also stick this in the fridge if you're not ready to make your French toast bread pudding (Frudding? Freading? Breadtoast?).

To bake, preheat the oven to 350. While it's heating up, spread the brown sugar mixture over the top of the bread and egg mixture using your hands. Stick in the oven and cook for about an hour. Your house will. Smell. Amazing.

 Before...

...after!

In the end, I'm not sure it matters if this is breakfast or dessert. I mean, Mr. Panda has been known to make these cinnamon rolls which are just full of sugar and butter and are guaranteed to give you cavities while making you cry from delicious happiness at the same time. And those are breakfast. So why can't bread pudding be for breakfast?

Make this for dessert and take it to a party and everyone will love you. Make it for breakfast when you have guests and they will adore you. Maybe not Uncle Morty, but you know, generally. Next time- and there WILL BE a next time - I think I want to incorporate some apples or raisins or even currants.

One last thing, and totally not food related, but this is hopefully the last week of blurry, unfocused pictures with weird shadows. I ordered a little mini photo studio! Not only will this make for better blog pictures, but I can't wait to torture my cats with it.

"Say what now?"

PO-TAY-TOH!

I think everyone who follows this blog is a Facebook friend, but on the off chance I have lurkers (hello lurkers!) or you don’t pay attention to my FB updates, let me tell you that I have been sick. I had a fever and the aches last weekend and now I have a subsequent respiratory infection and I just do not feel at all good. To make matters worse, I normally do my homework over the weekends, but aforementioned sickness made me put that off until Monday. I also usually plan my bloggable meal over the weekend. Again, sickness made that plan go poof.

So come Monday I was scrambling to finish my homework (due at midnight) and didn’t turn my attention to bloggable foods until it was far too late to go grocery shopping. All of this, friends, made me wish I could just do something ultimately simple.

Enter the potato.

What is a potato but a blank canvas? It can be a side or the base of an entree. You can eat it for breakfast, lunch or dinner. You can roast it, fry it, bake it, and now with modern technology- microwave it. And toppings! Don’t even get me started on toppings! Mostly because I’ll get to issues of toppings later and I don’t want to say it all twice!

Also, I’m a wee bit Irish. Just a tad. What with St. Paddy’s day coming up, I figured I’d practice my potatoing.

In case you’re keeping track, I have invented TWO new words so far in this post. Okay, maybe I’m not the first person to say “bloggable” but “potatoing”? Oh yeah, that’s all me.

Anyway, back to potatoing.

Even though I went for a simple recipe this week, I wanted something that looked elegant. Something that looks like way more effort than it really took. I keep seeing these recipes for Hasselback potatoes and they just completely fit the bill this week: simple, elegant, versatile. The original recipe I worked from can be found here . I both cut and altered the recipe.

Ingredients:

2 roasting potatoes

2 tablespoons of butter

1 tablespoon olive oil

salt and pepper

garlic garlic garlic

Of course what makes Hasselback potatoes so distinctive is the style they are cut into. They are evenly cut almost all the way through every quarter inch or so. I should have known it was easier said than done, but it's not something that you can't perfect with a little practice.

Don't do that.

Go slowly and you will easier time avoiding the mistake I made with potato number one up there.

Melt the butter and the olive oil together and then add the garlic. I didn't specify the amount of garlic in the ingredients list because I think you should use as much as you want. I'm sort of a garlic fanatic, so I used a lot. Like, a lot. Take the garlic, oil, butter mixture and pour it over the potatoes in a baking pan.

The original recipe says to make sure you spread the garlic inside all of the cuts. I thought "yeah right, too much work". But um, if you do use a lot of garlic? Go ahead and at least push it into the slits because I ended up burning some garlic chunks that were on top.

Bake at 425 covered with tinfoil for 45 minutes. Uncover and cook another 45 minutes, or until the very center piece yields easily to a fork.

Now, toppings. Think about it! These potatoes are just perfect for toppings! I especially wanted to cover these with some broccoli cheese sauce, but you could do chili, and a whole bunch of other things! I just did basic sour cream and cheese.

One of these is not a potato.

I can't wait to make these for company, let me tell you. They taste like potatoes, honestly, but they look just plain fantastic.

Chicken Saltimpanda

I was going to begin this post with "I've never had sage", but before I even got there I was informed that I have, in fact, had sage. Apparently the wonderful Mrs. Ballard, my almost-mom from South Carolina, puts sage in her Thanksgiving stuffing, which I've not only had but loved. I can safely say, however, that I've never cooked with sage before now. I was excited when I decided to make saltimbocca (original recipe here) to get the chance. 

I was not prepared for sage to be fuzzy. I mean, I knew it was going to change texture when it was cooked, but I found the fuzziness really off-putting. I also wasn't hugely excited about the aroma of it. 

Er... hmmm.

Then there was the lemon issue. I mean, if you look at the original recipe link, it does specify that it is "lemony", but I'm not sure I was prepared for quite that much lemon. Don't get me wrong- I love lemon. In fact, I love lemon so much I made a little song about how much I love things lemony. (Disclosure: I make up little songs about pretty much everything that makes me happy. Can't help it and no I won't sing any of them for you. Except maybe the cheeseburger song. But not right now.) Anyway, it was too much lemon, which really took away from the flavor of the ham. And it turns out I don't like the flavor of sage either (unless it's in Mrs. Ballard's amazing Thanksgiving stuffing). 

But I really liked the idea of the saltimbocca. Ham? Chicken? (Some) lemon? This all sounds fantastic! Surely I could find a way to make this work.

So I changed a few things around and decided to make Saltim-panda! I used tarragon instead of sage. Tarragon is one of my favorite herbs. It has a slight anise flavor, which is quite different from the tart sage flavor. I also cut the sauce with a sweet white moscato wine, which emphasized the lemons without letting them overpower the ham. To accommodate the extra liquid, I doubled the cornstarch (I had found the original sauce too runny anyway). I also added capers. Cause why not?

Ingredients:

Chicken breasts

Salt & pepper for seasoning

3 tablespoons olive oil

Pancetta 

Fresh tarragon 

1/4 cup lemon juice

1/4 white wine

1/2 chicken broth

1 teaspoon cornstarch

Start off by pounding out your chicken so it's flat as possible. If you don't have a mallet, use anything solid and heavy. I used our sugar jar. Oh yeah, wax paper keeps things from getting messy. 

Layer the chicken breasts with fresh tarragon. 

Then wrap in pancetta. Place chicken breasts in a saute pan with olive oil that has gotten nice and hot. Cook about 3-4 minutes on each side. 

It's possible I got a little ham-happy.

While the chicken cooks, combine the wine, broth and lemon juice in a bowl with the cornstarch. Whisk together and then add a few shredded tarragon leaves and the capers. When the chicken is done, remove from the saute pan and set aside (preferably someplace warm, cause my chicken kept getting cold while I was making the sauce). Add the broth mixture to the saute pan and bring to a boil. Boil for one minute while continuing to stir. 

Let sauce stand for approximately one minute until it thickens, then pour over the chicken breasts and serve.

Was Saltim-panda better than the original saltimbocca in the end? I think this says it all....

Roasted Pears with Marscarpone

Hey look! It's my first dessert post!

Sometimes using the wrong ingredients works out pretty well. As far as I can tell this is never the case with baking, but it worked out great when I recently made Roasted Pears with a mascarpone sauce. (Original recipe here.)

I didn't have heavy whipping cream or amaretto, so I used half and half and Tuaca instead. The result was a sauce instead of a whipped cream, but still, just delicious delicious delicious.

4 pears, split down the middle and cored (I used bosc, but use your favorite variety).
Some lemon juice for sprinkling
1 tablespoon of sugar (flavored with your favorite extract or just left plain, I used vanilla)
2 tablespoons of water
2 tablespoons of butter, seperated into four even pats

Place the pears fleshy side up in a roasting pan and sprinkle with lemon juice and sugar. Top each half with a pat of butter. Place water in the pan. Roast on 375 for 30 minutes. Turn the pears over and roast for 30 more minutes.

For the mascarpone sauce:
1 cup of marscarpone
1/4 cup of powdered sugar
1 cup heavy whipping cream
2 tablespoons liquor for flavoring (whatever you think will go best with a pear, I used Tuaca)

Super blurry picture, sorry. Was I drinking the Tuaca too much? Is it a better story if I say yes?

Combine all above and beat until smooth.

I wrote down the whipping cream, even though that's not what I ended up using. I probably should have, because the half and half I used left everything liquidy. Oh, and I probably should have measured. I think I used way more liquid in the mascarpone than was necessary.(See this is why I do not bake!) I considered adding more sugar to dry it out, but I tasted it and was immediately convinced it was just fine and needed to get on my plate right at that very moment. So I ate it. No really, I used a spoon. I even took a spoonful down to Mr. Panda. Then I put it on the pears and ate it all together. Delicious (and probably prettier if you use the right ingredients).

Cheap and Easy

Not everything new to my kitchen requires an innovative recipe and a near-alchemical process resulting in delicious food. Some things that definitely count as "new to me" just require me realizing that that oh-so-simple, oh-so-yummy food that I love and am willing to shell out for at a restaurant is super simple to make at home.

Case in point: caprese panini.

Caprese, often served without the bread as a salad, is usually just mozzarella, basil and tomatoes. The key to any recipe that requires such simple ingredients is to get quality. When you only have four or five elements going into a dish, each of those elements should be the best you can get.

I couldn't find any flat panini-type bread, so I ended up using a soft roll with a very crispy exterior. What a good decision that turned out to be! 

This might seem like nothing, like hardly even worth writing a blog post about, but when you can produce something this good out of your own kitchen for WAY CHEAPER than what you would pay at the store for it, I say its worth sharing. 

Again, mozzarella, basil, tomatoes, good bread. Squish and grill like this

Nom like this

Pumpkin Mac & Cheese!

This week we turn our attentions to another of Mr. Panda's less favorite foods- the pumpkin. While he's not as averse to pumpkin as he is to broccoli, he doesn't get quite as excited about the delicious orange gourd as I do. Just before he left for the week I asked him if he was least likely to eat Pumpkin Mac & Cheese or Pumpkin Gnocchi.  The blank stare I got in return clearly told me that he wouldn't be sad to miss out on either. Given that this was a very tough week (not only did I change jobs, but my new workplace was relocating so I was helping with the move... AND I have a paper due) I decided on the less-effort-required mac & cheese.

I'm of the personal opinion that cheese should be its own food group. This recipe calls for three- THREE- different cheeses; one soft and flavorful cheese; one medium texture melty cheese; one medium texture strong flavor cheese. Of course, with three different kinds of quality cheese, this recipe is not exactly cheap. Also, do you have any idea how hard it is to find canned pumpkin when it's not Thanksgiving? Ridiculously hard. I ended up paying $3 for a small can of organic pumpkin. And since it's February, it's not like I even had the option of cooking and pureeing my own (not that I would  have if I could have cause, well, I'm lazy). To top it all off,  I went shopping for the ingredients on Sunday evening, which is apparently when everyone and their mother is at the grocery store.

Between the price and the fight to get these ingredients, this had best be some damn good mac & cheese.

Know what? It was.

It was cheesy and pumpkiny, and not at all too-sweet. If you look at my ingredients and the ingredients in the original linked recipe, you'll notice I used way more cheese and totally different spices. I know when pumpkin is involved people tend to auto-grab the nutmeg and cinnamon. C'mon, you don't get enough of that in October and November? Try something else. Like Cardomom! (My favorite of all spices, by the way.) I also used garam masala, which is an Indian spice blend that I like a lot. I think one of my favorite parts of this dish was putting different spices in just to see how it would all come out. I encourage you to try even different spices- like maybe a curry!

 

What's in this?

- 1 box of pasta (I used elbows, but any short shape'll do!)

- 1 can pumpkin puree

- 1 cup half & half (non fat ok)

- 1 1/4 cup of creamy cheese such as brie or camembert

- 1 cup sharp cheddar

- 1 cup emmanthaler

- 1/2 tsp cardamom

- 1/2 tsp garam masala

- 1/4 tsp Kosher salt 

- 1/4 tsp pepper

What did you do to it?
- Cook pasta in boiling water til al dente
-Whisk pumpkin with milk in a medium to large saucepan over medium heat until hot, then reduce to low and add cheeses a little at a time until all melted.

Sauce should look like this before all cheese is melted, only less sideways. Hmm...

- Once the sauce is smooth and all the cheese is melted, mix in your spices.
- Taste the sauce. Add more of whatever you'd like - even CHEESE!
- Drain pasta and return to pot
- Pour cheese sauce over pasta and mix it up until cheese is everywhere!

I know that pumpkin + pasta + cheese may not sound all that appealing to some people. But! It was so delicious. You should try it. Be adventurous! Unfortunately, I need to master how to cook for just one or two people, cause I think I could have fed an army with this recipe. Anyone want some pumpkin mac & cheese? The leftovers aren't bad!