It’s a funny thing, but the recipe I’m asked for most often is the one I’m most reluctant to give out. Every time I mention that macaroni and “cheese” is one of E’s favorite dishes, parents wanting to wean their kids off the dairy stuff and onto something more healthy ask me for the recipe. For a long time, I had to tell them the hard, cold truth: The “cheese” that E loved above all others came from a package, and though I tried recipe after recipe, she wouldn’t eat any other mac and cheeze.

And then one day I decided I’d had enough. I was having to mail-order Road’s End Cheddar Style Chreese in bulk once every couple of months to keep E supplied with her quickest comfort food. (Her other favorite comfort food, lasagna, doesn’t fit into the make-it-on-the-fly category.) Each time I made it, I would look at the short list of ingredients and think that there had to be a way to recreate it at home and I just hadn’t hit the right formula yet.

So in the interest of eating more local and fewer packaged foods, I started experimenting. I took the sauce from the one cheezy recipe that she had liked, Scalloped Potatoes, and tried that on macaroni. No dice. What worked on potatoes didn’t work for her on pasta. So I tinkered with it and then tinkered some more. Finally, sometime last spring I hit on a formula that worked, and we’ve been Chreese-free ever since.