(catchy music) - You know the story, you cook for the kids and the grown ups find it unappetizing.

You cook for the grown ups and the kids won't touch it.

You just can't win.

Well, I'm here to tell you, yes you can.

Try making my mini meatloaves, a kid-sized version of the classic comfort food.

The kids can help make it and everybody loves it.

I like to serve it with spiced peas and onions because it reminds me of my mom.

Later in the show we'll visit a nun who just also happens to be a cheese making expert.

Finally, we'll put some of that cheese to work in my odd lots mac and cheese.

It's basically every leftover cheese you have in the fridge mixed into a creamy pot of mac and cheese.

There's something for everyone.

That's today on Sara's Weeknight Meals.

(catchy music) Funding provided by - [Voiceover] Subaru builds vehicles like the versatile Subaru Forester.

With symmetrical all-wheel drive and plenty of cargo room.

A recipe made for whatever the day brings.

Subaru, a proud sponsor of Sara's Weeknight Meals.

- [Voiceover] Family owned and Indiana grown Maple Leaf Farms is a proud sponsor of Sara's Weeknight Meals.

Providing a variety of duck products for home kitchens, Maple Leaf Farms duck helps inspire culinary adventures everywhere.

Maple Leaf Farms.

- [Voiceover] And thanks to the generous support of - Later in the show we'll make my odd lots mac and cheese and since I've got mac and cheese on my mind we've decided to go visit a woman who makes cheese and her cheese is heavenly.

(religious singing) - When you see the transformation of what happens in a cheese cave, that to me is the exciting part.

It's kind of a mystery -- you know -- when something beautiful comes out on the other side.

My name is Mother Noella Marcelleno, I started the making of Bethlehem Cheese at the Benedictine Abbey of Virginia Laudis, in Bethlehem, Connecticut.

(religious singing) - [Voiceover] It's not just any cheese and Mother Noella isn't just any cheesemaker.

She's a world expert in the microbiology of cheesemaking and her story is as unique as her cheese.

(peppy music) - I entered the abbey in 1973 and cooked practically from day one.

Lady Abbith knew I loved France and so she asked me if I would try to make cheese.

And I told Lady Abbith I was praying for an old French woman to come and teach me and actually a young French woman came two days later and she was amazed that we had the same fungi here in Bethlehem Connecticut as she had in the OFAC.

- [Voiceover] And that was the start of an extraordinary journey.

At a great sacrifice, the abbey sent Mother Noella, who had never been to college, to get a PhD in dairy microbiology then a Fullbright to study cheesemaking in France and what she found is that cheese doesn't need store bought cultures to ripen because there are thousands of natural strains all around us - These microorganisms in the environment give this cheese its characteristic flavor, consistency and appearance but they're native to my land.

So my cheese tastes like our land.

- You ready?

- [Voiceover] At the abbey it starts with the Dutch belted cows, hand-milked by the nuns.

- You are so pretty.

What the cow eats is very important and some of these microorganisms are on the grass and then that gets transferred to the milk and we don't pasteurize the milk.

So these microorganisms are growing and give our cheese a characteristic flavor of our land.

The way we make our cheese we use an oak barrel.

Most cheesemakers would be adding commercial cultures of lactic acid bacteria.

But what we do is we depend on the lactic acid cultures from previous batches that are growing in this wood.

You wanna keep the environment of the barrel close to the cow's body temperature and it's helped the curd to form, but also it's gonna help us release the whey from the curd.

- [Voiceover] The process is slow, breaking the curds, collecting them with a paddle, pressing them by hand in the barrel, then in forms.

- You can see that it's very labor intensive and it's hands on and it's very meditative.

You have to press one section of that curd consistently and gently.

You're trying to make it more solid but you have to do it gently and I think you have to be very patient to make this type of cheese.

And I think in that sense it teaches you to be more patient.

- [Voiceover] In the cheese cellar it rests for 60 days and there, a miracle of sorts occurs.

- We're giving these microorganisms a little home.

It's a cheese.

They're living in that cheese for their own survival.

It's giving them a place and it's giving them nutrition.

This substrate, which is cheese, which is curd is being degraded by microorganisms.

Wanna taste some cheese?

- Love to.

- And it's sort of a leap of faith because you don't know how it's going to turn out but then when you open a cheese and you smell it or you taste it and others taste it it's like what is this?

It's a totally other thing.

And it just makes it all worth it.

We can't finish that whole thing.

- I know, I'm going to die.

(majestic music) - [Voiceover] And for Mother Noella that transformation has everything to do with faith.

- When I think of myself as a eucharistic person our life is based in communion and also living the cycles the mystery of passion, death, and resurrection.

I'm working with -- we call it an elemental area -- that is kind of showing me the resurrection.

Cause there's a lot of death going on in that cheese but then it's an amazing thing.

Some people are afraid to look at death, and of course we all are in many ways, but when you're tasting this product which is the result of degradation, to me it prepares you for resurrection.

(catchy music) - I don't know about you, but my fridge tends to fill up with odd assortments of chunks of cheese from all sorts of occasions.

You know, a little bit of bleu cheese, a little bit of cheddar, a little bit of fontina or Monterey jack and camembert, cottage cheese, oh my goodness.

Well, I've come up with a terrific recipe it's called odd lots mac and cheese where you take whatever cheese you've got kicking around in the fridge and you just make a big vat of mac and cheese.

So we're gonna start by cooking our pasta.

Just check on the package, this is like six to eight minutes here depending on how well you want it cooked.

I might go the al dente route so it can absorb all the cheese I'm gonna add to it.

Give it a stir right away so it doesn't become on gluey mess at the bottom of the pot.

And meanwhile I'm gonna make my sauce.

So we're gonna start with some milk.

I've got a quart of milk that I've heated up.

I like to have it be hot when I add it to my roux which is what's going to thicken the milk.

And roux is nothing more than equal parts of butter and flour.

I'm using six tablespoons of butter and then I'm gonna add to that six tablespoons of regular all-purpose flour.

(peppy music) And we're gonna just cook it until it looks like wet sand.

It takes a couple of minutes.

We wanna cook the starchy taste out of the flour.

Okay, so no we're going to add our hot milk and you start by adding it slowly and whisk it like crazy until it starts to thicken and then add more.

Whisk again until it looks smooth and then the last bit.

I'm gonna turn this up and this won't reach its full thickening capacity until it comes to a full boil.

I'm gonna keep an eyeball on that while I measure our flavorings.

So we have some Worcestershire here but you can add anything you want to your mac and cheese that makes you happy.

This is just a free for all.

So here goes a tablespoon of Worcestershire which gives it that sort of depth of flavor.

And then we're gonna add a teaspoon each of hot sauce, mustard, and salt.

I'm gonna start with the salt.

(peppy music) Yes.

Now I'm going to turn it down and let it simmer while I go down and deal with my cheeses.

Okay, so I've got you can add anywhere between eight and twelve ounces of cheese, eight ounces is just fine.

So let's start with my cheddar which is nice and sharp.

This is Monterey jack, which is a great melting cheese.

You want to have a nice mix of melting cheeses, sharp cheeses, creamy cheeses.

So I think I've got quite a bit in there, I'm just going to add a little bit, the remainder of this camembert.

Now we're just going to let this melt.

If you turn it too high and boil it, it could become grainy as cheese doesn't like that high heat.

I'm going to let this melt gently while I (catchy music) Add the cheese sauce.

When you first add the cheese sauce it's very loose, almost soupy.

And then as it sits, it gets thicker and thicker and thicker that's because the pasta starts to absorb the sauce.

Okay, so look at how soft this is.

You see it's really nice and creamy.

Okay, now I'm going to show you how to make a wonderful Sunday comfort dessert, a creamsicle, which is like an ice cream soda.

First we start with some fresh orange juice that I boiled down.

I took two cups down to one cup.

So we're gonna start with my ice cream in the bottom of a tall glass.

Next we top it off with a quarter cup, which is about a quarter of this, of our reduced orange juice.

And finally, and this is the piece de resistance, we're going to top it off with some soda.

And I'm going to start with some homemade seltzer.

So now we're just going to top this off and those are serious bubbles so don't pour too quickly or you'll end up with it all over the top.

So now that we've got the important things done, dessert, let me spoon out my mac and cheese.

Oh just one more spoonful.

And then I have some delicious bacon here you can put on top we've got a few tomatoes, here's the healthy part going in, and there it is, your odd lots mac and cheese.

So what kind of wine would you serve with a dinner like this with mac and cheese?

Most people think cheese, red wine.

I don't think that way, I like white.

Oddly enough, I like a crisp white with body I think that's the perfect combination with mac and cheese.

So make your next Sunday dinner memorable by giving this wonderful recipe a try.

It's the perfect occasion to get everyone around the table and jumpstart a new week with good food.

(relaxed music) Now we're making meatloaf, which is something everybody loves.

And yeah it's rustic, but who cares?

If they love it, I'm gonna make it.

I'm starting with the vegetables.

I've got a cup of finely chopped onion, two ribs of celery and some garlic and we're going to sautee that until softened.

And this will make the meatloaf real nice and moist.

We're going to make a glaze.

It's funny when I was a kid I used to literally drink ketchup out of the bottle.

We have a picture of me drinking ketchup out of the bottle.

So let's face it, meatloaf is all about the glaze.

So let me get all of this into the pan with a little bit of oil I'm going to make not only meatloaf, I'm making mini meatloaves.

Everybody gets their own personal meatloaf and the kids are going to love it.

For the glaze, the aforementioned One cup of ketchup and then we need to have that little bit of sweetness in there cause that's classic meatloaf.

So we're going to add a quarter cup of brown sugar, and then we need a tablespoon and a half of cider vinegar.

Okay Let's get our vegetables in there.

And we want these to cool off because we don't want hot vegetables with our ground meat but the good news is, everything I'm adding to it right now is going to cool it off.

So we're going to start with a quarter cup of the glaze.

In goes the parsley and this is a quarter cup.

And then we have a cup of fresh breadcrumbs.

You know when I'm cooking, what I will often do is I will pull absolutely everything onto the counter and then I'm like, oh I need to add mustard, oh yes I need to add thyme, oh yes I need to add salt.

It's all right there and it talks to me so I'm not going to forget it.

A teaspoon and a half of thyme.

And then we're going to need two and a half teaspoons of salt and we're going to add two tablespoons of dijon mustard.

Mustard's really great in here, it just adds another je ne sais quoi.

So we need a cup of sour cream one egg so I'm making this recipe, I'm going to add all this raw meat to it.

I can't taste it when it's raw so what I'm going to do instead is just make a little sample burger, a tiny one, just to correct the seasoning.

All right, next comes the meat.

So we have a pound of ground chuck, which has a nice amount of fat in it.

That's our beef right here, that's the ground chuck.

I've got a half pound of pork and a half pound of veal and each one of these meats adds something else it adds a different flavor, it adds a different texture, it just makes it far more interesting.

If you wanted to you could do it all with beef, all with pork, I doubt you'd do it all with veal cause veal is slightly harder to find and a little more expensive.

Oh, didn't I say you put everything on the counter so you don't forget it?

I'm using a dry measuring cup, you should use a wet one but it doesn't really matter.

A quarter cup of milk and milk is a tenderizer in there.

You want to mix this until it's well mixed.

Now if you want dense little meatloaves which you sort of do with meatloaves, right you don't want it to be loose and flaky you mix it a little more.

The more you mix ground meat the sort of denser it gets the chewier it gets.

And that's not a bad thing with meatloaf.

All right so you can see it's sort of a soft mixture that's because I've got all that nice sour cream and egg and milk in there, but it's nicely mixed.

Now I'm going to put a little bit into the pan.

Here's our little meatball, our little burger.

I'll just let that cook, take about four or five minutes.

Lemme wash down and then I'm gonna slice an onion.

So we're gonna be making two other things with our meatloaves.

We're gonna be making peas and onions that are spiced Indian style, or sort of Indian style and then I'm also going to be making smashed potatoes which is just the simplest way to make mashed potatoes and I'm gonna invite over the next door neighbor kids and see how they like all of it because it's all pretty kid friendly.

Most kids like peas cause they're sweet and certainly who doesn't like potato, particularly with butter.

So I'm slicing these onions to go with my peas and onions This looks good.

And see how we're doing.

Hmm, that's very good, that worked out well.

Hm, yeah, okay.

So I'm going to do this trick we all love.

This is one of those things you're like who first thought of this?

I'm using an ice cream scoop to get the meat on here.

I'm just going to make six right now because I'm going to you know, shape them and freeze them later on but I'm going to do a heaping ice cream scoop, this is a half a cup, and then shape them all and then I'm going to glaze them all.

(light music) All right, so now into nice little loaves.

Now get a piece of plastic wrap, spray it with a little oil then you can use the plastic wrap instead of your hands to shape the mini meatloaves.

Isn't that cool?

All right.

Here we go with the best part.

Of course if I was the only one eating these I would put all sorts of hot stuff in there, chilis but this is for everybody.

This is going to go into the oven at 350 for 35-40 minutes.

Okay now I'm going to start on my smashed potatoes and my peas and onions.

We're gonna use these little potatoes, this is two pounds of the really small guys.

If they're any larger than this just cut them in half.

And any boiling potato will do, certainly you could use a baking potato also, but for smashed potatoes I like a little bit of texture.

And you don't need to peel them because the skins are so thin and tender.

So I'm going to add cold water, you always start with vegetables in cold water.

And we're going to cover it by about one inch and the reason for that is because you want them to cook evenly.

If I put them into hot water the outside would cook before the inside.

Okay, we bring this up to a boil.

But let me add salt, you can't add the salt afterwards you have to add the salt now.

So I'm going to turn that on and put a lid on it just to get it up to a boil and then turn it down to a simmer.

And then on to my peas and onions.

So just a little bit of oil.

Okay, here goes the onions.

We're going to cook these on medium for about eight to ten minutes until they're really nice and golden.

What else I need besides the salt is milk and butter, of course.

So here's some butter.

So one cup of milk.

And we won't need all of the milk I don't think but I like to have it hot and ready.

You need about three quarters of a cup to one cup and now I'm going to heat it because if we added cold milk and butter the potatoes would be cold.

All right, I am going to go out and get some chives while all of this cooks and then I'm gonna come back and finish up and bring in the kids, find the kids to help me mash those potatoes.

(light music) - Hi Sarah.

- Oh hi guys, how are you?

- Good.

- Are you hungry?

- Yes.

- You ready to cook?

- [Girl] Yes.

- [Sara] Okay I got some mashing for you to do.

Come on in, maybe a few other things too what do you think?

Okay guys come on in.

All right so I've got everything going I'm gonna just chop a few chives.

Lemme just get this out of the way.

Does your dad make meatloaf?

I know he's the big cook in the family, right?

- No, I don't think so.

- No, he doesn't make meatloaf?

Okay, well -- but you've had it?

- Yes - Yes.

Lemme get these potatoes drained.

Okay, now I'm gonna have you -- what you do -- lemme just start to show you how to do it.

So you just get in there and you go argh, argh, okay?

- Okay.

- So you stay on this side of the pan and you stay on that side of the pan.

There we go, meanwhile I'm going to get my onions out.

Let's add a little butter, that will make it easier, okay?

You like butter don't you?

- [Girl] Yes.

- [Boy] Yes.

- Oh, that was -- you want the big tool, right?

- [Boy] It wasn't really working.

- [Sara] Lemme grab my spices here, all right?

Okay we're gonna add some salt.

Are we okay with salt, we like the flavoring?

- Yes.

- Okay, and I'm gonna add some milk.

These don't have to be really smooth.

Okay, I'm going to toast half a teaspoon of cumin seeds and then I'm gonna add a teaspoon of mustard these aren't real strong they're just sort of fun and we just give it 30 seconds and then we're gonna pop in our peas.

In go the onions, these are sauteed onions and should we add a little butter to this too?

- Um, maybe just a little bit.

- Just a little bit, okay.

You're doing great.

- Thank you.

- Very good stirring.

- With the fork.

- Oops.

Well that's all right.

Isn't that a pretty color?

- [Boy] Yes.

- And if you two are happy... - Should I taste this?

- You wanna taste it?

Oh, I like the way you think, you're thinking chef-like.

Okay, tell me if it -- watch out, blow on it it's going to be hot.

Tell me if you think it needs more salt or more butter.

And here are the meatloaves.

Look at this.

- A little more butter.

- A little more butter?

- [Boy] And Salt.

- [Sara] Okay, okay.

Look at this.

Aren't those beautiful?

Watch out this is hot I'm sneaking around behind you.

Aaliyah you can go sit down.

And I'm going to serve you all.

Now you know what's on top of it is the glaze that has ketchup in it.

We all like ketchup, right?

- Yes.

- Oh good.

I'm going to serve you, how's that?

I'm going to put a little bit of chives on mine do you want to try the chives?

- [Girl] Sure.

This is the garnish.

- [Girl] Thank you.

- So this is like the last touch.

So what do you think?

- It's really good.

- Hm, that's pretty yummy.

That's very good.

- The peas are good.

- The peas are good!

Oh you make my day, make my day.

Wow, meatloaf, mashed potatoes, peas and onions.

Perfect weeknight meal for both the grown ups and the children, right?

- Right.

- Thank you two Aaliyah and Mekhi for being my fabulous sous chef.

I think we have a future here, you were very good helpers.

Let's finish it up.

You notice how I'm taller than you right now.

I'd like to keep it that way.

- Just a little bit.

- I have a feeling with your parents who are both so tall you're gonna be taller than me.

Hmm in about six months, maybe sooner.

- [Voiceover] Sara's Weeknight Meals continues online.

For recipes, helpful tips, messages, and lots more visit us on the web at saramoulton.com/weeknightMeals and go to our YouTube Channel, Sara's Weeknight Meals TV.

Funding provided by - [Voiceover] Subaru builds vehicles like the versatile Subaru Forester with symmetrical all-wheel drive and plenty of cargo room.

A recipe made for whatever the day brings.

Subaru, a proud sponsor of Sara's Weeknight Meals.

- [Voiceover] Family owned and Indiana grown, Maple Leaf Farms is a proud sponsor of Sara's Weeknight Meals.

Providing a variety of duck products for home kitchens, Maple Leaf Farms duck helps inspire culinary adventures everywhere.

Maple Leaf Farms.

- [Voiceover] And thanks to the generous support of