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.
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.