Mac 'n' cheese 'n' eggs pantry supper
OK, this is not exciting, but it is what I had to work with. Coming home after Christmas, I intentionally did not have a lot of fresh food in the house. (And we won't talk about what happened to the rest of the spinach and arugula, okay? At least I have a compost bin. The clementines have, amazingly, survived in the fridge, so I still have to come up with more for them. Later.)
So I made mac 'n' cheese with eggs. Fortunately, the milk was still good, but I do always keep some of that shelf-stable milk in the pantry, so I could have used that. And eggs, especially in the fridge, are good keepers.
I had:
--dried pasta (this happens to be a whole-wheat macaroni. It is smaller than “normal” elbow macaroni. It works. It actually tastes good, not like cardboard that has been in the basement for a while. You may notice that I have for years tried various whole-wheat pastas. They are getting better. )
--cheese (what kind? how much? Answer: Whatever you have. I grated the "butt " ends of some pecorino that were in the fridge. Probably a couple of ounces, but grated, it looked like 3/4 of a cup or so. Grated. Lots of air.)
--milk
--eggs
--V-8 juice (or anything healthy. Not an ingredient, it's a supplement. See below. If you have veggies, fine.)
--seasonings: Salt, pepper, dry mustard, paprika
--crackers, preferably leftover from a party. Six or so big ones, 12 little 'uns. I would not buy crackers just to make this. I would put leftover crackers in a plastic bag in the freezer to use for something like this later. If I had no crackers, I wouldn't cry.

So:
Set the oven to 350.

Boil water, with salt.

Add dried macaroni.

When it is done, drain and set aside.

Put the crackers in a baggie and smash the living daylights out of them. Crumbs is what we are going for here. Aah, that felt good.

Melt 2 T butter in the same pan, medium heat. Stir in 2T flour. Use a wire whisk and be sure it is well combined, which means, get the corners. Add some milk. I can't tell you how much-- but a little at a time, keep stirring. At first you may think it is lumpy. Do not give up. Keep stirring with the whisk. As it thickens, add more milk, a little at a time, up to a couple of cups total. At some point, it may look like you have added too much milk. Don't panic. As it simmers, it will thicken. This is what my grandmother and mother called a white sauce. It is what Julia Child called a Béchamel. Yes, you have just made a Béchamel sauce. See how easy?

When the white sauce is thick, turn off the heat and add some grated cheese, a little at a time, so the sauce itself melts the cheese. Now it is what Julia called a Sauce Mornay. We call it cheese sauce. See how easy? The trick is to grate the cheese and let it melt in the hot Béchamel. If you try to melt huge hunks of cheese over high heat, well, I guess everyone has to do that once. I think it may be how Charles Goodyear invented vulcanized rubber. Learn from the past.

Now, put the macaroni or other pasta into an ovenproof dish (you might want to butter or oil it) and pour the Sauce Mornay over it. Add the seasonings. Maybe stir a bit.

Now, here's the fun part. Break an egg into a saucer or cup. Take a spoon and push the mac 'n' cheese aside a little and pour the egg in. Repeat, for however many eggs you want.

Sprinkle the top with cracker crumbs and dot with a little butter. (optional)

Bake until the eggs are the way you like 'em. I like them pretty darn cooked, but with part of the yolk still soft and still orange, not yellow.

(This is an alternative to adding sliced hard-boiled eggs to a casserole, which also works but then you can't get the soft yolk.)

V-8 juice. Because there are no veggies here, consume with a glass of vegetable or fruit juice. If you have frozen peas and want to, add them to the mac ‘n’ cheese before baking. I, stunningly, was out of frozen peas.

Yes, I could have added yet another ingredient from my pantry, such as dried beef or (gasp) canned chicken, tuna or (double-gasp) Spam, but I really wasn't that hungry. But if I was snowed in, I just might. If my freezer had contained frozen peas, I wouldn't have hesitated to add them, except that as you add more ingredients, you produce, by volume, more leftovers.