The picture is your starter. Assume a basic pantry for your other ingredients. What are you cooking?
These two ingredients were less than $4 total when I bought them.
For me, an obvious choice here is quesadillas. A little bit of salt, baking powder, oil and water and you have tortillas. You could add a little sour cream or hot sauce or peppers and onions or any number of other things to make this into a meal.
What are you going to make? How much is it going to cost per a person? Bonus points if you know how long it’s going to take? You kind of have to rest tortilla dough for 30 minutes. So for two people this meal is going to take me about an hour.
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Not included in the price is the cutting board. I made it years ago as an experiment to see if I could frame an edge face cutting board without it cracking breaking itself apart. It’s made of poplar and it refuses to die. Materials caused on it was probably about $10. Labor time was probably about 2 hours.
Poplar makes a horrible cutting board. It’s too soft even though it’s a hardwood. However, for end grain butcher blocks it’s a champion. I usually only use this for cutting and serving pizza because every knife mark shows on it.
Cheesy bread
Cheese biscuits if you have enough butter. Yum.
Mac and cheese!
Make a Bechamel sauce, stir in grated cheddar until it’s properly cheesy, add a pinch of nutmeg and white pepper. Pour over macaroni, add more grated cheddar on top, and bake.
If I had aged Gruyere I’d mix that with the cheddar.
Is macaroni really the right word for that in this context? I’m pretty sure you don’t have a elbow noodle extractor. Pappardelle, Tagliatelle, Fettuccine?
I think this needs a seasoned breadcrumb topping when you boil it.
I assumed a basic pantry for my other ingredients
The reason I made the distinction there is because I can totally accept macaroni noodles as a basic pantry item. But I was thinking make the pasta because you have the flour. I can see the confusion here. You’re going to take pre-made elbows and use the flour for the cheese roux. I get it. I just wasn’t seeing it at the time.
By the way, I have elbow macaroni in my pantry right now. About 2 lb worth. They are sealed up in mason jars to prevent the pantry moths from getting in.
I have never made pasta before and while I want to give it a go, I don’t think I’d start just for mac and cheese.
My wife has made spaetzle from scratch before. It might be one of the easiest pastas to form - just squeeze the dough through a coarse strainer for finer pieces or out of a piping bag for more coarse pieces. And a disposable plastic bag with a corner cut off works as a piping bag. I think a nice cheese sauce would work perfectly.
If you have a pasta roller, it’s a snap! 400g flour, 4 eggs, little oil, little salt. Form into a dough, it takes a while to come together. It’s a difficult dough to work. A mixer can help. 8 minutes or so of kneading. Rest the dough an hour, roll out into sheets, and then either use the noodle attachment or cut it into noodles by hand. It honestly only takes like 15 minutes of actual hands on effort and 90 minutes of total time.
Just scratch made mac and cheese.
Not OP, but I would have thought a basic pantry included staples like rice, cheap dried beans, and pasta (probably elbows or shells, since they’re pretty versatile).
I’d also do mac & cheese, the same as theirs, but with different seasonings: a little sauteed, minced onion or a dash of onion powder; a tiny bit of mustard for creamier cheese sauce; and a dash of black pepper.
PS: This is great! I hope you do these regularly.
More is the plan. That’s why I did 001 instead of 1.
Yes, a basic pantry would include those items. Picture yourself somewhere between 1850 and 1870 living on the prairie what’s in your kitchen. What can you get access to? You definitely have sugar and yeast. You probably have cinnamon. You don’t have saffron or caviar. But you have all the starches like rice, bean, potatoes and flour to make pasta. You definitely have milk and butter, but you definitely don’t have 9-month aged parmesan.
An Italian kitchen in 1850 would!
My dummy brain went “well I’ll just eat the cheese as it is then make some bread with the flour” lol. Could make cheesy bread as others mentioned. Maybe cheesy rolls? Rolls with a chunk of cheese inside.
The first thing that came to mind of cheese naan.
Cheese biscuits. Cheese bread. Bread with cheese. Noodles with cheese. Cheese pizza. Quesadillas. Depending on your pantry (salt, fat, leavening agent, liquids), there are so many options.
I do like this idea as a daily or weekly challenge.
Might need to be constrained with a standardized list of pantry items.
This is an international group. Different areas with different pantries.
If I had the time and wanted to be fancy about it I’d maybe make some flatbread, or better yet crackers. Maybe some savory herbs in it.
Then just slice cheddar and snack.
Cheesy biscuits
That does seem to be the dominant choice.
I don’t know if it was a choice… but I’m hungry and it sounded good lol
First jump is some southern cheese biscuits.
Check my reply to other comments for a cheesy biscuit recipe.
I don’t know shit about cooking. Could you melt the cheese in a pot and then add some flour to thicken it up like a fondue texture? Then cut up some Vienna sausages into 1/4 chunks and put a toothpick in each one. Then you can dip the sausage bites into the fondue.
I think you need a little bit of wine to make that work but yeah. I can see it. I’d probably also make some crusty bread. You already have the flour. All you need is some salt yeast and water.
Crusty bread with beer or wine cheese fondue sounds really tasty
Does this basic pantry have eggs? Cuz if I have 1 egg, I can make fried cheese with the flour and cheese.
I suppose I could do it without the egg, just making a simple flour water dough to encase the cheese. 🤔 Take less time than making a quesodilla. And probably better anyway since that isn’t corn flour.
I hope it includes eggs. It would be weird if it didn’t.
Cheddar cheese biscuits (a la red lobster) come to mind - butter, baking powder & soda, salt, garlic powder, sugar, milk would be basically all you need.
Have that with eggs served however you want. Bonus points for eggs benedict if you can get a lemon too and some more eggs to make a hollandaise.
$4 for flour and cheese, probably $1.50 of butter, $1 of various pantry things, ~$0.50 for a lemon, ~$0.50 of milk, $3 for a dozen eggs. ~$10.50 total. 4 servings. ~$2.13 each
I found this recipe like two decades ago. I made it and my girlfriend swore that it was a perfect clone of Red lobster biscuits. You can tell how long it’s been in my notepad because it talks about things like biscuit mix which I would now make from scratch and it would talk about shredded taco cheese instead of the specific cheeses. This is long before I really started cooking from scratch.
Mexican Drop Biscuits
2 cups biscuit/baking mix
1 cup (4 ounces) shredded taco cheese
1 can (4 ounces) chopped green chilies, undrained
1/2 cup water
3 tbsp butter, melted
1 tsp dried parsley flakes
1/4 garlic powder
1/4 tsp dried oregano
1/4 tsp dried thyme
1/8 tsp cayenne pepperIn a small bowl, combine the biscuit mix, cheese and chilies.
Stir in water just until moistened.
Drop into 12 mounds 2 in. apart onto a greased baking sheet. Bake at 450 for 10-15 minutes or until golden brown.
In a small bowl, combine the butter, parsley, garlic powder, oregano, thyme and cayenne pepper; brush over biscuits.
Broccoli cheddar soup, using the flour to make a roux + a cup of milk mixed with chicken broth. Ideally with some crackers to crumble on top… Probably would take me 20 minutes or so to make. Not sure on cost exactly – maybe ballpark of $3 or so? I have everything on hand to make that right now, actually, except the crackers. (I suppose I could make crackers with the flour, but that’s more trouble than I’d normally want to go to cooking just for myself.)
Pizza.
I have thought about cheddar pizza a couple of times and my brain always shuts off.
Cheddar goes really great on taco/nacho pizza.
Or a cheeseburger pizza.
Or Mac and cheese pizza. (Found at Aldi. They slap.)
To name a few.
CiCi’s pizza when I was a kid had macaroni and cheese pizza I fucking loved and think of very nostalgically, cause I was a picky eater that loved both pizza and mac and cheese
I will tell my wife about the Aldi mac and cheese pizza and let her decide if that’s a thing that’s allowed here. She’s probably going to go for it because it’s two of her favorite things.
I hadn’t really thought about nachos being a variation of pizza. You have a tomato-based salsa, cheese and a carb substrate. Every chip can be its own pizza. In which case cheddar is totally allowed.
I like to do a cheddar sauce instead of tomato and then top with mozz, cumbled beef, and bacon bits.
Instead of tomato sauce? So like a cheesy bread with meat toppings people might do if they got heartburn from a tomato sauce? Are we talking like pizza crust then or like focaccia?
