Practical engineering triumph of the day

Hey, I warned you that some of these posts would be fluff...

Aside from running and singing, cooking is one of my off-hours passions. I've done it since college, but I've only taken it seriously in the last six or seven years. As with running and singing, I've had to back off quite a bit to make time for studies. One of the obvious optimizations is to make meals that really are two meals. Chili mac is a favorite. I make chili one day and then dump the leftovers in a baking dish, top it with mac&cheese, and bake it the following night.

Now, as anyone whose cooking skills have advanced beyond mac&cheese from a box knows, the trick is getting the cheese sauce the right consistency. The ratio of butter, cheese, milk, and flour can be tweaked on the fly to get the desired thickness, the problem is lumps. If you add flour at the end, it all clumps up. I've usually mixed it into the milk with a whisk and then added the milk slowly to the melted cheese and butter until it's the thickness I want. That works, but you still wind up with a few lumps. Nobody really cares because, after you bake it, the little flour lumps are indistinguishable from little pieces of pasta. It's just one of those things that is fun to get really right (plus, there are lots of other uses for cheese sauce where the lumps do matter).

Enter the immersion blender. Does a great job of getting rid of the lumps but, since I only need a few ounces of milk, it's hard to get it to actually immerse. As you might guess from the name, it doesn't work very well when not fully immersed. My immersion blender is from Cuisinart and it came with a 2-cup measure. I didn't read the pamphlet that came with it, so I just figured that this was one of those things that get thrown in with an appliance whether you need it or not. It's a nice graduated measuring cup and it's microwave safe so, fortunately, I held on to it.

It occurred to me while splattering myself a few weeks back trying to use the blender in the actual pan on the stove with the melted sauce (DON'T TRY THAT; IT DOESN'T WORK AND HOT CHEESE WILL BURN YOU), that the measuring cup is just barely wide enough for the immersion blender to fit into. Could it be that Cuisinart actually designed these things to work together? So, this morning, I tried it (I usually assemble the dish in the morning so Kate can put it in the oven before I get home). Wha'dya know? It whipped the tablespoon of flour into 4 ounces of milk perfectly. As I gently stirred it into the melted cheese and butter a blemish-free sauce formed in the pan before my eyes. It's like Velveeta except that, being made from substances found in nature, it actually tastes really good.