This is not my best photo. I was in a hurry. I was hungry.

That said, I found myself in a bit of a pickle. In fact, it was worse of a pickle than normal. I had a fridge full of nothing to eat and a dad who had driven me from Chicago to Champaign for the bajillionth time this year and he was in the garden pulling weeds (and scolding me for planting cilantro where he told me he had planted the beans, oops).  I had to make dinner. I couldn’t let my dad go hungry.

My fridge had: caramel sauce, 3 bottles of beer, mustard, jelly, half a bag of shredded mozzarella, eggs, milk, yogurt and cilantro. This is not the stuff of great recipes. It is the stuff of a single girl who had not been home all weekend. I couldn’t let my dad go hungry. I found myself wishing that I had cheddar cheese and evaporated milk to make Alton Brown’s stove-top mac and cheese. I couldn’t get mac and cheese out of my head, no matter how many things I pulled out of the cabinets, nothing else sounded good. Or wouldn’t kill my dad.

So, out of desperation was born a new favorite around here.