Turns out it’s actually a dish created by his wife, Marja, who has her own TV show and cookbook out called The Kimchi Chronicles (she’s also Korean). Writes Vongerichten in the headnote: “This is one of the most requested dishes in my home, especially when we have children over. instead of making a béchamel sauce, Marja simply blends her ingredients and bakes them into a rich custard that suspends the pasta. her blend of five cheeses creates layers of flavors in this homey casserole. Marja’s always happy to bake it for a crowd, and everyone’s always happy to eat it.”

Marja’s Mac ’n’ Cheese
Serves 12
From Home Cooking with Jean-Georges: My Favorite Simple Recipes (Clarkson Potter, 2011)

Unsalted butter
1½ cups heavy cream
1½ cups half-and-half
²⁄³ cup whole milk2 large eggs
2 large egg yolks
½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
6 ounces extra-sharp Cheddar cheese, shredded (1½ cups)
6 ounces sharp Cheddar cheese, shredded (1½ cups)
6 ounces mild yellow Cheddar cheese, shredded (1½ cups)
6 ounces Monterey Jack cheese, shredded (1½ cups)
1 pound dried elbow macaroni
4 ounces cream cheese, chilled, cut into small pieces

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter a 13 × 9 × 2-inch baking dish.

Whisk together the cream, half-and-half, milk, eggs, yolks, and nutmeg in a large bowl. Season with salt and pepper and whisk again. Combine the shredded cheeses in another large bowl and mix well.

Cook the macaroni in boiling salted water until almost al dente, about 3 minutes. The pasta should still be firm. Drain well.

Spoon a third of the macaroni into the buttered dish, and top with a third of the cheese mixture. Season with salt and pepper. Repeat layering and seasoning twice. Dot the surface with the cream cheese, then carefully pour the cream mixture into the dish.

Bake for 5 minutes, then use a large offset spatula or the back of a spoon to spread the melted cream cheese evenly over the top. Continue to bake until just set, about 40 minutes. Serve warm.

One of the most requested dishes in Jean-Georges Vongerichten's home is now made in mine.

I’m busy editing our upcoming dairy issue and have milk on the brain all day long, so it’s little wonder this is what my dinner looked like last night.

I’m a loyal Organic Valley customer, and not because they’re an Edible advertiser. My husband, a livestock farmer who hails from upstate New York’s dairy country and has years of morning milkings under his belt, has always insisted that we stock our fridge with Organic Valley. I always knew it was organic, but now know it’s farmer-owned cooperative that does right by its members.

I recently got my hands on Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s new casual cookbook Home Cooking with Jean-Georges: My Favorite Simple Recipes, and while I look forward to making several of the Asian-inflected recipes like mussels in konbu broth and bulgogi-marinated flank steak (his wife’s Korean), these days my main clientele is one three-year-old, so I opened straight to the recipe for mac and cheese.

The headnote says it’s one of the most requested dishes in the Vongerichten home, which is saying something. And true to the book’s premise, it’s super simple—you don’t even make a roux. Just boil some good old elbow macaroni (I subbed in whole wheat), then, if you’re me, break out the Organic Valley. Not only does this recipe call for butter, milk, half-and-half, and heavy cream, it of course deploys plenty of cheese—three types of cheddar plus Monterey Jack. But the crowning glory is, get this, cream cheese. After throwing everything else together—oops I mean assembling the layers—you dot the top with little blobs of cream cheese, which, once baked, become the best part of the dish. The recipe calls for four ounces, but I just might double that next time.

The recipe also calls for two eggs, plus two yolks, and you could get those from Organic Valley too. But my husband has left cows behind, and now tends hens, so I pester him for eggs and save my pennies for dairy runs.

Our daughter— whose name, Bess, may have destined her to be a dairy queen—digs this dish. And given the good ingredients, I don’t mind when she wants it for breakfast. This morning she had a few bites and then stopped to request a drink. Her pairing of choice? Milk.

Want to make it yourself? Get the recipe here.

Chasing cheese makes for some wickedly zany moments when Jason Sobocinski gets in front of a TV camera. The 33-year-old maitre fromager gleefully takes viewers on a gastronomic journey to find fine curds in his new Cooking Channel show, “The Big Cheese.”

It’s a name he’s rightly earned. He knits his brows, wrinkles his nose, purses his lips, crinkles his eyes and otherwise hams it up while touring livestock pens, cheese caves and restaurant kitchens, even plodding through snow to join farmers in the milking parlor before the morning light creeps above the barn weathervane. This is a man on a mission—to spread the good word about curd.

Take the theme-song lyrics: “I like my cheese on a slab of bread, with whiskey or a beer instead. I want a belly full of curds,” and then the refrain kicks in: “I want cheese with my cheese.”

Sobocinski owns an award-winning bistro cum fromagerie in New Haven called Caseus—named for the Latin word for cheese—but it’s not his style to stay put, and the show follows him to lactation destinations across the country. He bottle-feeds kid goats at Belthane farm in Lebanon, Connecticut; herds sheep into the milking room at Old Chatham farm in the Hudson Valley; and milks cows at the Fiscalini farm out in Modesto, California.

Wherever he goes, he packs his outsize personality. He relishes the amalgamation in a grilled sandwich starring many cheeses, the way jam marries so well with strong cheeses and the popularity of his panini of prosciutto, fig preserves and Taleggio on ciabatta. He winces upon tasting unseasoned goat cheese, exclaiming, “It pows you in the face”—once he’s able to relax his cheek muscles. (After the cheesemaker salts the chèvre, Sobocinski tastes again and beams: “It’s a different cheese. The transformation is unbelievable.”) And throughout it all, his lexicon is peppered with words like “stinky,” “crispy,” “guttural,” “bloomy,” “oozy” and “goozy”—not quite Masterpiece Theatre script.

Currently completing his master’s in gastronomy at Boston University, Sobocinski feels that in introducing viewers to the people behind real cheese, he offers an intimate look at a culture— and at what defines us all. Each segment is a socioeconomic, anthropologic, gustatory exploration.

You’ll wish you could follow in his footsteps, but viewers not ready for a life on the lam get the next best thing: When he lifts a wedge of Point Reyes blue cheese to his nose and it’s smelling of mushrooms and the forest floor, you can almost taste it.

Righteous local raclette, for $24 a pound.

The newest cheese on the counter at Lucy’s Whey in Chelsea Market is the Reading Raclette, it’s a raw cow’s milk cheese from Spring Brook Farm.  A few weeks ago we had the cheesemakers here, they met customers, talked about cheesemaking and gave samples of both their cheeses: The Alpine-style Tarentaise and their newest, Reading Raclette. Traditionally, Raclette is made in both Switzerland and France, so are very, very excited to have an American version from the Green Mountain State, Vermont.

Spring Brook Farm won 2nd place at the American Cheese Society Awards in 2010 for Tarentaise, so we’ve been looking forward to trying this new cheese for quite some time. Their high quality cheese comes from high quality milk. At Spring Brook Farm the milk comes from a herd of 40 Jersey cows. With the cows and the cheese production at the same location, the cheesemaker and herdsperson work closely together to produce truly unique, distinctive, farmstead cheeses.

Reading Raclette is mild, semi-soft cheese that has flavors of sweet milk, with a sour, tart rind.  It’s delicious on its own, perfect for snacking, but really, it’s true calling is to be melted over potatoes and served with ham, pickles, and a little side of whole grain mustard. We’ve put it on a sandwich with the Spicy Brown Ale mustard from My Friend’s Mustard in Brooklyn, and it’s a heavenly match!

Raclette gets its name from the French word racleur which means “to scrape,” although it originates from the southern part of Switzerland.  The first people to discover the deliciousness of this cheese in melty form were the cow herders. High up in the Alps, the herdsman would take some Raclette and warm it by the fire turning soft and gooey. Then they would scrape the cheese on to potatoes, pickles, or charcuterie, the perfect dinner!!

Since not all of us are so lucky to visit France or Switzerland, we can read about the traditions of Raclette (here is a great blog post from David Lebovitz), and swing by our Lucy’s Whey stand in Chelsea Market to pick up a wedge of Spring Brook Farm’s Reading Raclette! For more photos from Lucy and my visit last February, visit the Lucy’s Whey blog right here.

The food-focused household of editors Jack Bishop and Lauren Chattman, who live just down the street from Cavaniola’s Gourmet in Sag Harbor, speaks of life before- and after-Cavaniola’s. Indeed, When Michael and Tracey Cavaniola opened their cheeseshop on Division Street, they filled a certain kind of gap in the town.

There was their extensive, curated selection of hand-picked cheeses, including early offerings from Mecox Bay dairy and Catapano goat farm. The store had excellent chocolate and olive oil and pasta and other to-go-with-cheese essentials. The store evolved and grew and today, neighbors can pop in in the morning for a croissant and coffee, and in the afternoon for cheese and wine. Now, this corner of town has become a veritable one-stop-shopping opportunity. (Sag Harbor Beverage next door has been getting in all sorts of craft beer, if you haven’t noticed.)

And, with the beautiful shop’s latest addition of eye candy–a fire-engine red Berkel manual crank meat slicer featured in the video tour above–Cavaniola’s adds yet another offering to their menu: Machine-sliced cured meat that tastes like it were cut by hand. “Four out of 10 cheese shop customers get prosciutto now,” says Michael as he demos his superior slicing, shows us what they’re dishing–from smoked bluefish spread to potato chips to salad in a jar–at Cavaniola’s Kitchen next door, and takes us through the subterranean Umbrella Building, one of Sag Harbor’s oldest structures, that has become Cavaniola Cellars. See all three of this shops above, and be sure to visit him in person at 89 Division Street if you’re out in Sag Harbor.

Grass-fed deliciousness from Bobolink, produced in entirety just outside the city.

The Ingredient:

Local dairy, the tenth of our 11 Ingredients of the Day.

Why It’s Important:

We knew we loved all things creamy, cheesy and milky, but it was Edible reader Benny Radjasa who drew this awesome fact to our attention, back when we were polling you for ideas on these very ingredients:  Dairy products were New York state’s top agricultural commodity in 2009, as well as our top agricultural export.  In fact, New York is the third biggest exporter of dairy products in the nation.  What pride we feel! Though we’re not opposed to eating dairy from our greater foodshed, either, meaning Vermont, no slouch in dairyland or artisanal cheesemaking, Connecticut, home to Greenmarket staple Cato Corner, and New Jersey, home to the stinky, incredible wedge shown above.

And though we love all the dairy products — cream, milk, butter, creme fraiche, yogurt, sour cream and buttermilk — you might be able to tell we hold a special place in our heart for cheese.  Not only is it super tasty and versatile (we eat it for breakfast and dessert!) but it’s what Radjasa and the USDA call a value-added dairy product, meaning that by processing their milk and turning it into cheese, dairy farmers are increasing the value of their milk by making it something special that consumers are will to pay more for.  Nationwide, dairy farmers often struggle to make enough money selling their milk on the commodity market to recoup the costs of feeding and caring for their animals.  But they can charge more for value-added products like cheese, yogurt, butter, and ice cream than they can for simple milk, thus increasing their chances of making a profit.

If that means eating more cheese will help New York dairy farmers survive, count us in!

Why We Love It:

On cool fall mornings, we anxiously hop from one Greenmarket stall to the next, sampling the funky, moldy, sharp and spreadable offerings of our local dairy farmers.  (At Union Square, the number of sellers is in the double-digits.) Whether it be an artisanal cheese — one made by hand, in small batches — or a farmstead cheese, an artisanal cheese made only with milk from a particular farm’s cows, sheep or goats, we love the flavors and textures of these dairy creations.

Cheese is the perfect addition to a picnic. (Even if that picnic, these days, is in your living room). It pairs wonderfully with a glass of wine.  Just imagine all the dishes that simply couldn’t exist without cheese.  French onion soup without that slice of broiled, bubbly gruyere?   Fondue without that hot, oozing pot of cheese to dunk everything in?  Cheesecake without the ricotta?? Poutine without curds? Pimiento without orange Cheddar? A world without fromage, well…we don’t want to go there.

In this book, The History of Food, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat discusses the long and uncertain history of cheese as ascertained from archaeological digs, Biblical references and even cuneiform engravings on clay tablets.  According to him, cheese formed part of the ancient Sumerian’s diet and may have been made possibly as far back as 6000 BC in Europe.  It’s uncertain who figured out how to get milk to form curds, but one possibility is the shepherds and goatherds who carried milk in containers made from the bladders and stomachs of slaughtered animals.  Rennet, one of the most common coagulating agents used to make cheese, is a mixture of enzymes naturally present in the stomachs of cattle, sheep and goats.  It’s possible that these ancient animal caretakers unknowingly happened upon cheesemaking by accident! Lucky us.

Where to Find It:

At the Union Square Greenmarket you’ll find delectable cheeses from the likes of 3-Corner Field Farm, Calkins Creamery, Cato Corner Farm, and Valley Shepherd Creamery, to name a few.  We can’t get enough of the aged, raw-milk cow’s cheeses from Bobolink Dairy (check out our slideshow of Bobolink’s moldy, pungent formaggio here).

Plus, this week you can stop by Eat Drink Local partner restaurants who will be serving up special dishes featuring local dairy.  At Aquavit you can enjoy wild mushroom veloute and pork belly-pearl onion-grilled cheese paired with a chardonnay from Long Island.  BAMcafe‘s Chef Cheese Selection includes baked Old Chatham camembert.  Benchmark Restaurant will feature local artisanal cheeses from Saxelby Cheesemongers.  Stop by Braeburn Restaurant for yogurt souffle with Concord grape sauce.  DB Bistro Moderne will offer Vacherin, pears and milk chocolate, and chantilly.  At Dizzy’s try the cauliflower and Old Chatham camembert soup with fresh farm herbs.  El Cafe, Mae Mae Cafe and Wave Hill will be serving a New York State Cheese Plate with Hudson Valley camembert, Ewe’s blue, Tumbleweed cheddar, Concord grapes, and grilled Orwashers bread.

Meanwhile, check here for many more Eat Drink Local restaurants featuring dairy this week.

What do you do with all pimenton dulce you never cook with? This!

It may be safe to say that we have almost fully prepared you for Eat Drink Local week (the countdown is on: Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!), but we’re guessing you’re already unable to contain your excitement; eat, drink, and local are probably the only words you’re paying attention to right now. Well, we’re totally stoked for next week too, but since we don’t want you to go hungry in your state of anticipation, we’ve found a few worthy events to tide you over till the 26th.  (And for those of you who really are only reading this because you saw the words “eat,” “drink,” and “local,” don’t worry, we’ve included those key words a few more times to make your reading experience more enjoyable.)

The first day of Autumn isn’t until Wednesday, but you can get a jump on it at the Brooklyn Kitchen tonight for their Harvest Dinner, where you’ll be preparing a meal with the best LOCAL, farm fresh ingredients the kitchen can find with the instruction and creativity of Chef Kat Randazzo.  Best part of this deal: you get to finish the night off by EATing the meal you helped prepare and DRINKing wine pairings from Vine Wine.  Hit up the Brooklyn Kitchen website ASAP (or call to see if you can still show up)  if you’re “fall”ing in love with this event.

Our apologies for the cheesy pun, however, it does seem that cheese is becoming quite the popular word around here… it was on our mind last week with Clare Burson’s 117-year old cheese, we’ve been waiting all weekend for tonight’s Beer and Cheese Re-Match, and Murray’s Cheese in Greenwich Village is on the same page as us this week with two classes all about, you guessed it, cheese (the third event they have planned for tonight is already sold out).

First up is a sweet evening in which you’ll learn how to pair a variety of honeys with several cheeses.  Ahem, yes, you get to EAT them.   The event is called “Oh Beehave! Honey & Cheese at Murray’s” so listen to the cheese people at Murray’s: beehave and purchase your tickets fast, as this event is happening on Tuesday night.  Then, for those with a secret aspiration to be a cheesemonger, or those just dying to know more about our friend cheese, Cheese U Boot Camp is the weekend activity for you.  The sessions run over three days and will start out with all the basics, then lead up to teaching you how to talk cheese like a pro.

Also, this weekend, Brooklyn Based is hosting their first ever food and kitchen-wares swap!  Bake up your favorite treat, or dust off an old crock pot that you don’t use anymore and head to the Littlefield performance and art space to trade your stuff in for some better goods (hence, the event’s name: TradeUP!).  If you’re not convinced yet, visit the Facebook page to see what others are bringing, and when something catches your eye you can add what you’ll be bringing onto the list! There’s even a raffle you can enter to try to win tons of gift certificates and experiences from LOCAL vendors to support St. John’s Bread and Life Soup Kitchen.

If none of those pique your interest, check out the other upcoming events the Edible crew has spotted by visiting our Events Calendar. It’s updated frequently, so be sure to check it often.  You can also follow us on Twitter to see the events as soon as they’re posted!

The re-match

Speaking of cheese, we’ve always been fans of the dairy experience at Essex Street Market down there at the corner of Delancey. You’ve got the best of American caseus curated at the counter at Saxelby, and the best of the rest (of the world, natch) at Formaggio Essex.

So we were happy to find out the folks who work there wondered, as we did, which continent kicked more ass? (Okay, we agree they both produce incredible products with both terroir and true skill, but we’re trying to build a wrestling-type storyline, right?)

A few weeks back we were among the lucky few to attend the first Formaggio-Saxelby smackdown, in which cheesemongers at both shops partnered with some of Brooklyn’s best independent beer-shops (Formaggio with Spuyten-Duyvil Grocery, Saxelby with Bierkraft) to suss out exactly that. American cheese with American beers, European cheese with European beers, both teams breaking out their best products and their most mind-blowing pairings for just 12 lucky tasters who get to vote at the end of each round.

All were amazing. But in the end, the Olde World did leave the new world with a black eye in the corner of the ring. And they didn’t even use the Parmigiano-Reggiano!

There’s been other matches so far, teams paired with wine or other quaffs, but Monday night is the rematch of the original crew, and there are only a limited number of seats left — if any — so RSVP to bittersweetsoursalt@gmail pronto if you’re interested. You can root for your favorite nation, but as far as we’re concerned, tasting a dozen amazing cheeses and beers is totally a win for Manhattan no matter the outcome.

With help from the LES Tenement Museum, Burson set aside the 117-year-old cheese in a bell jar rather than tin-foil, though she told the New Yorker she was "conflicted" about its shiny new home.

We’ve been meaning to give a shout out to the New Yorker’s piece on Clare Burson’s 117-year-old cheese all week. Not only did we scoop the fine mag — go us! — covering Clare’s caseus story in our last issue, we did them one better: We have an actual photo of the cheese, right here. In fact we saw it up close and in person at a dinner Burson hosted with historical gastronomist Sarah Lohman.

Burson is a singer-songwriter who created an entire album called Silver and Ash of folksongs about her family’s history, which includes that cheese, passed down over several generations. At the dinner, Burson sang, Lohman cooked several courses based on Burson’s family stories and songs, and the cheese looked on the whole time. We think it was happy. We know we were. You can of course get the whole story (we know it sounds complicated) right here.

Anne getting to the um, heart of local cheese on one of the amazing field trips (A Day A-Whey) she regularly hosts. Photo from Saxelby Cheesemonger's Flickr Photostream http://www.flickr.com/photos/saxelbycheesemongers/

The Cheesemonger:

Anne Saxelby, purveyor, local cheese cheerleader, owner of Saxelby Cheesemongers

What She Does:

Like any good monger, Anne was pulled by an obsession—an obsession, in her case, for cheese. A college trip to Florence, Italy is to blame for ditching the degree in art and signing up for a job at Murray’s; an internship with Cato Corner Farm in Connecticut taught her the power of locally-sourced stuff, both in terms of flavor, sustainability and local economics. That’s why most of the cheese at Saxelby’s comes from American farmsteads in Vermont and New York, along with a few in the outskirts of Connecticut, New Jersey, Maine, Virginia, Wisconsin and Indiana. (The only non-American cheese? Parmigiana Reggiano, since there’s only one place to get that Italian essential: Emilia-Romagna.) For an über-local spread, choose from Lively Run goat cheese (Interlaken, NY), Sprout Creek Farm raw cow’s cheese (Poughkeepsie, NY), Three Corner Field Farm pasteurized sheep’s cheese (Shushan, NY) and even fresh ricotta from Salvatore Brooklyn.

Why We Love Her:

Anne’s palate for local farmstead cheese is outstanding, and we love her even more for being a voice for local foods—in her public tastings (in-store and at restaurants like Jimmy’s No. 43), her participation in local markets (like the New Amsterdam Market) and her weekly Heritage Radio Network series, Cutting the Curd.

Where To Find Her:

You can usually find Anne (or her tasty selections) at her self-named shop in Essex Street Market at the corner of Delancey Street every Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Or find her online at saxelbycheese.com, where you can also keep track of upcoming tasting events like the real field trips appropriately called A Day A-Whey. And hey, she writes, too: Check out her piece on fermented milk at Casellula in our January-February 2009 issue!

From September 26th to October 6th Edible Manhattan, Edible East End and Edible Brooklyn — in conjunction with Edibles statewide and GrowNYC — present Eat Drink Local week, our celebration of the local food chain through heirloom vegetable auctions, wine tastings, DIY challenges, lectures, garden tours, farm to table dinners and countless other events. Over the next few weeks we’re highlighting a few of the restaurants, wine shops and wineries, breweries and beer bars, farms and food artisans and cultural institutions that the week is meant to celebrate.

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Vernon, N.J.: I can’t say this speck of a town ever made my must-visit list, but when my friend Ilana suggested a weekend getaway to her childhood home,  I couldn’t resist.  Besides, she promised, the leaf-peeping was fine and the local cheese out of this world.

That weekend we did our best to shake off the stress of the city and soak up all the country goodness we could.  We wore our pajamas all day, played cards and watched movies and spent an entire evening roasting vegetables and baking apples.  But the highlight of that cool, rainy weekend was a visit to Bobolink Dairy, an unassuming farm we nearly missed after a wrong turn on a winding road.

I was expecting to find a farmer who’d learned how to make a couple basic cheeses and sold them alongside fresh eggs.  Instead I was delighted to find an array of pungent, moldy fromage and hearty loaves of bread flavored with everything from salty olives to succulent duck fat.  This was no casual cheese-making operation.  Just one bite and I was in love.

Hoping to meet the geniuses behind this robust cheese, I headed to the Union Square Green Market the next week to visit Bobolink Dairy’s stand.  Sadly neither Jonathan nor Nina White were working the booth that day, but a phone call and an e-mail later Jonathan agreed to meet me in the city and chat about his cheese.

Over a couple of pints at d.b.a. in the East Village Jonathan brandished a pocket knife and sliced into wheels of his raw milk cheeses, letting the dense cream ooze out from the rinds.   As we munched on bread and cheese, Jonathan enlightened me about the secrets of good cheese-making.  I won’t spoil the fun, but check out my slideshow above to learn how an engineer and a dancer/choreographer/teacher by trade ended up making cheese in Jersey.

And next time you’re at the Greenmarket (they’re at Union Square on Fridays and Lincoln Center on Saturdays) stop by their booth for a taste of pure grass-fed deliciousness.