Picture a Day - Day 97

Time for another version of "Super Easy recipes anyone can make" or "How I learned to stop worrying and love the dairy counter."

I stumbled upon this when I had no idea what to make for supper one night but had a weird hankering for an alfredo sauce. It was my first attempt at a white sauce so it was an interesting explosion of oopsie and goodness.

All you need to make this "Cleaning out the fridge" sauce is butter, garlic, Parmesan cheese, cream cheese and milk.

I usually start off by cooking up some chicken or pork with a little thyme and parsley (you can't get my away from the spice rack) in butter while my husband sets to chopping up all the garlic. If you're a big garlic fan I'd say use about 3-4 good sized cloves, but if you're only a somewhat fan of that vampiric aromatic maybe start out with 2 and if it's too weak add more the second time.

Once the chicken is done, dump that off onto a waiting plate and add a half stick of butter to the pot and all that nicely minced garlic (another trick, the finer the garlic the stronger the flavor): You'll also want to soften up the cream cheese. If I was smart I would have put the package on the stove when I started cooking so the heat of the stove would start melting it, but I'm not smart so I had to work it with my hands.

I get a bit impatient and just ripped open the packaged and dropped big ooey gooey balls in. Now for the hard part, you have to keep stirring the cream cheese, butter, garlic mixture or it will burn.

No really, don't stop. If you do it'll all go south and then everyone will be crying and hungry and the faeries will show up and try to steal your first born!

As the cream cheese starts to melt, add in the parmesan cheese (about a cup though I wouldn't fault you if you wanted a bit more. Who doesn't want some more cheese?) and slowly add about a cup of milk.

Then back to stirring. Stir, stir, stir. Waiting for everything to melt. Just keep stirring, just keep stirring.

Okay . . . STOP!

Does your sauce look like this (mushrooms optional)? Kinda white and yellow and creamy enough you're sure it will stick to your ribs? Now's a good time to start tasting, though good luck stopping.

Just mix back in the the chicken and plop onto some pasta and voila a very rich but very tasty white sauce. You're gonna have leftovers too, it's so rich it's really hard to eat much.
A perfect dinner for those harried Tuesday nights when it's freezing cold out and you have ten other things you need to be doing. Someone needs to make a cookbook devoted to tuesday nights where you can only have at most 10 ingredients.

That would sell like hotcakes. Mmmm, hotcakes.