Easy Mac (less than $2; about 15 minutes)

Seriously. Does anyone know what that orange powder is that comes in a box of mac and cheese you buy when you need comfort food?

Specifically, where the hell does the orange come from? It's neon, it's weird, it probably sneaks around in your cupboard at night, inviting the marshmallow cream to help out in its seduction of the brownie mix. It probably has one of those round, rotating beds. It probably listens to Al Green and wears necklaces with Italian horns on them. Honestly, it probably needs a good two weeks of penicillin. I mean, who knows what it's bringing to the table? Could be anyone. Could be anything.

I like orange. I wear a lot of orange. This orange just frightens the bejesus out of me.

Hence: easy mac, homemade. It's white. And, aside from what might be hiding in the white (by which I mean in the parm, the milk, the canola, or the pasta), you know what you're eating.

I guess ideally you'd make your own parm from the milk you got from your own cow/sheep; your own oil from your own canolas (canolis? Does anyone know what a canola is? [okay, CANada + Oil + a? Really?]); and make your own pasta from wheat grown on your own property, from dirt you made -- and from eggs you harvested from your own chickens whom you feed with your own scratch -- and from whatever else you might decide you can gather from around you, unpolluted by the touch of other people's diabolical plans to poison you with neon-orange additives.

But let's say that for the time being, we're just going to move one step closer to controlling ingredients. And that this is, in fact, as easy or easier that that box mac you ingest, or give your kids to ingest, on any given day.

Here's what you'll want. This will feed at least four people as a meal.

Large sauce pot

pound of pasta, any shape. Flat pasta cooks faster than pasta that's bunchy. The fastest is angel hair. The slowest I've found is gemelli.

some parmesan, any sort -- even (and here's how you can tell this is not a gourmet recipe) the stuff in a shake jar.

A little milk.

a little oil.

That's it.

Okay, boil the pasta until it's the tenderness you like it. My Nana complains that Americans eat their pasta raw (which is her word for al dente); I say, if you want to chew, undercook. If you want to gum and slide for your mastication, have at it.

If you've never boiled pasta before, the rule is a LOT of water. Pasta needs to swim, so cover it and then some. Boil the water, add the pasta. Keep it boiling until it's done.

Drain the pasta and shake it to clear all the water. Return it to the warm pot. Drizzle on some oil, maybe a TBSP. Splash in some milk, less than a 1/4 cup. If you want some herbs, try a little oregano. Also, you can weaponize with jalapeno paste; just stir it in at this point.

Keep the pot, and the pasta, warm if you need to on a VERY LOW heat. Mix so all the pasta's coated. Put some parm on it, maybe a 1/4 cup max. Stir once or twice, very lightly.

Do this again and again until when you stir, you don't see milk puddling in the bottom of the pan.

Parm is funny and can clump, so you don't want to over-stir. If it clumps, peel that part off the spoon, eat it, and keep going. Add a little more milk if you think the pasta's not coated to your liking.

The finest meal-variation of this is to add peas to the boiling water. Pasta Parm Peas is what I used to call it. You can also add shrimp or chicken. If you do, you get to name it.

There you go.