Ina Garten's Croque Monsieur | Barefoot Contessa | Food Network

So I think I'm going to make croque monsieur, which is like a French ham and cheese sandwich. So the first thing I need to do is make a roux, which is a white sauce. I need two tablespoons of butter. Melt that. Three tablespoons of flour. And you just dump the flour in all at once. Cook it over low heat, just for about a minute or two, until the flour is a little bit cooked. White sauce is a really convenient thing to know how to make. It's great for thickening things like chicken pot pie. It's great in gratins. Now what I'm going to do is add two cups of scalded milk. That's milk that's heated just below the boiling point. And just cook that until it thickens. Just stir it the whole time so it doesn't burn. Okay, it's thick. Just below the boiling point. So now I'm going to add a teaspoon of salt, half a teaspoon of pepper, and a pinch of nutmeg. It's classic in white sauce. Half a cup of parmesan cheese and half a cup of grated gruyere. And it's all just going to melt together in the sauce. So it's really nice cheese sauce with lots of flavor, because the parmesan and gruyere taste very different. It gives it a real depth of flavor. This looks good. Okay, now I'm going to assemble them. So what I've done is I've toasted the bread, taken off the crust, and I baked them at 400 degrees for about five minutes. Turn them and bake them another two minutes and they're ready to go. Now what I'm going to do is put a little mustard on one side. Croque Monsieur is a classic French lunch. And any good cafe in France has Croque Monsieur or Croque Madame, which is exactly the same thing with a fried egg on top. So get a thinly sliced, a really good either baked Virginia ham or a Black Forest ham, something like that. And then sprinkle some gruyere right on top. The other slice on top of that. A little bit of the cheese sauce. It's really cheesy. More gruyere on top. So I'm going to bake these at 400 degrees for five minutes, and then I'm going to broil them for three to five minutes. They'll be nice and brown and crusty on the top. Look bad, do they? Lunch is ready. This is my idea of what a business meeting should be. So how about a Croque Monsieur, which is a French ham and cheese sandwich. If it tastes as good as it smells. I hope it does.