They’ve been out of our usual white cheddar mac and cheese at Trader Joe’s for a couple of weeks, so I’ve been buying Annie’s at QFC. Annie’s doesn’t sell elbows, except in the microwave format; your choices are shells or bunnies. I prefer shells. I also noticed that at QFC, the small and large boxes of Annie’s both cost $1.99. I prefer large.

I like the Annie’s fine; it’s basically the same as the TJ’s. (And who knows, they might be the same cheese packet.) There’s only one drawback to the pasta shell format…

LIMPETS!

Sorry for the late notice, but if you live in Seattle and like grilled cheese sandwiches, there’s an event in Seattle with grilled cheese sandwiches that you should know about. (Apologies to Sol Tucker.)

It’s tomorrow, Thursday, May 17, from 5pm to 9pm in the bar at Union, 1st and Union, downtown Seattle. Chef Ethan Stowell will be making eight different sandwiches from Laura Werlin’s book, Great Grilled Cheese. Werlin will be on hand to sign books. (Contrary to what I posted earlier, her other books will not be for sale at the event, but obviously she’ll sign them if you bring them in.)

Each sandwich will come with a beer pairing, for $8. If you’re not into beer, I’m sure there will be wine or a la carte options. Here are some samples:

Cheesy Ga**sh**ouse Egg Sandwich featuring Beecher’s Raw Milk Flagship
Wrasslers XXXX Dry Stout, Porterhouse

Salami & Cheese featuring Beecher’s Just Jack
Zwaanend’ale, Dogfish Head

Grilled Goat Cheese with Tapenade featuring Port Madison Goat
Celtic Angel, Serafijn

Roasted Beef with Onion Jam & Rogue River Blue
Meantime Scotch Ale

Goat Cheese & Honey on Raisin Bread featuring Beecher’s Fromage Blanc with Honey
Cassisona, Birrifico Italiano

Laurie, Iris, and I will be there early. Come on down and eat sandwiches.

As long as you don’t mind being known as Dr. Thrifty, it would behoove you to print Mark Bittman’s column in last week’s New York Times and hand out copies to the grads and newlyweds in your life.

The column, entitled “A No-Frills Kitchen Still Cooks,” details how to outfit a new kitchen for under $200 by shopping at a restaurant supply store.

I take issue with some of his recommendations; I’ve used the $10 knives he’s talking about, and I think you’d be better off with a $30 Forschner. But I can’t argue with the overall gist. The new issue of Fine Cooking just came, and it has a review of six medium saucepans, none of which is under $100. I have two 3-quart saucepans, one of which cost about $120 and the other $30; neither is really superior to the other, except that the $30 one has a better handle. I do feel loyal to my ten-inch All-Clad saute pan, which has unusually perfect dimensions, at least for my stove.

At the end of the column, Bittman lists ten “inessentials” that he thinks you can live without. I use my microwave every day (mostly for melting butter and defrosting Armour Brown & Serve sausages, an essential if ever there was one) and my stand mixer once a week or so.

Bittman didn’t bother to list “meat grinder” on his list of inessentials. Around here, however, it’s essential and becoming more so.

A couple of weeks ago, Iris and I were at QFC shopping for ingredients for ants on a tree. Iris looked at the ground pork and asked, “Why are there squiggles?” I explained how a meat grinder works. “Hey, would you like to grind some pork at home instead, so you can see how it squiggles out?” She agreed. We bought some country-style ribs instead, brought them home, and hooked up the grinder attachment to the Kitchenaid. I let Iris operate the stomper, which is what you call the wooden dowel that pushes the meat into the worm gear that shuttles it to the blade. Iris was transfixed, and the meat was much better than QFC’s packaged ground pork, which was ground off-site days ago and is too low in fat.

I’m making ants on a tree again tonight. I put the meat in the freezer for twenty minutes (which results in a better grind) and set up the grinder while it was chilling. “If you need Iris, she’s over there playing with the meat grinder,” I told Laurie. Then Iris taught Laurie how to grind meat. If she becomes a butcher, I will officially kvell. Especially if she’s a punk rock butcher.

Lara Ferroni held a photo contest. The winner in the “edibility” category was a photo of phad thai from Rice and Noodles, a blog by Mae Gabriel. I wanted to eat it immediately. If you don’t want to eat it immediately, I’m not sure we’re going to hit it off.

The recipe called for Maesri phad thai sauce in a jar. When I make phad thai, I make my own sauce. It’s good, but as Strong Bad would say, it has officially reached rigamarole status. Mae’s phad thai is streamlined. No garlic or shallot beyond what’s in the jarred sauce. Just egg, noodles, phad thai sauce, fish sauce, scallions, and bean sprouts, cooked in peanut oil and then garnished.

First, I had to find Maesri phad thai sauce. They didn’t have it at Uwajimaya. Ordering it online would have been absurd. Then I remembered Mekong Rainier Grocery, at 3400 Rainier Ave S. It’s the only Thai supermarket in town that I know of. (Actually, I think the owners are Lao, but the ingredient overlap is nearly total.) They had it for $1.29, along with a bunch of other Maesri sauces, plus many brands of fermented gouramy fish.

Because I’m a meddler and because I was making this for myself for lunch, I simplified the recipe even further. I left out the meat, threw some chile flakes in with the sauce, and garnished with just bean sprouts, peanuts, and lime juice.

It was excellent, of course. I’d use a little more sauce next time, but a lot of lime juice made it more than flavorful enough. The most time-consuming part was boiling the water and then waiting for the noodles to soften. They should make frozen rice stick noodles that you can just thaw in the microwave and have them ready to stir-fry. That’s my kind of convenience food.

There’s an odd vacuum in the local hamburger bun market. You like sesame seed buns, right? I do. What I don’t like is a bun so large that it dwarfs my patty or forces me to make a gargantuan meat disc. When I go to the supermarket, however, all I ever see is normal-sized plain buns or huge sesame buns, such as Franz BBQ buns.

But you can get an ideal bun in town, if you’re willing to patronize a top-quality independent local bakery. Oh, you are? Then head to Columbia City Bakery. Their sesame buns (which are used at the excellent Roy’s BBQ–as well as other local restaurants, I’m sure) are five for $3.50, and they’re great. A little sweet, little resistance to the bite, and a dense crumb. I wish they were baked a little longer, but that’s about all I can complain about. You even get to slice them yourself, which means you can avoid the skinny-bottom-bun problem.

Pick some up on a Wednesday afternoon, when you can visit the adjacent farmers market, one of the best in town. You can even get your grass-fed beef patties at Skagit River Ranch.