I’m sure many of you have gone through this scenario: you open up the fridge and all you see is capers, ketchup and cheese, and nobody has gone grocery shopping in three weeks. At times like these, I usually pull out the takeout menus and order Mexican. However, one day I was feeling particularly resourceful and decided to concoct something out of the sparse ingredients in my fridge: cheesy rice.

It is now one of my favorite recipes, and I have started making it at school when nothing in Usdan appeals to me. I’m not sure if I invented cheesy rice—after all, it’s fairly basic—but I’ve never met anyone else who has stumbled across the same idea. I figured it was time to share the recipe when one of my friends tried my cheesy rice the other day, and I caught him sneaking back into the dining hall to make more for himself. While I don’t think Ina Garten would approve, cheesy rice is tasty, satisfying, and has that warm, stick-to-you quality that makes it great on a cold winter day.

Instructions:

You start with a bowl of rice: whether it’s brown rice, white rice, or lemon rice doesn’t matter, whatever you can find in Usdan. Head over to the salad bar and put a nice, healthy scoop of cheese on your rice. I like a 1:1 ratio, but if you’re not the biggest fan of cheese you might want to put a little less. Then go look for the hot sauce. At lunch it’s usually next to the stir-fry station, but at dinner you might need to search a little longer to find it. You might even have to ask one of the chefs to fish it out of the fridge for you. Even if you don’t like hot sauce, I highly recommend this component because it just doesn’t taste the same without it. You can opt for the red or the green Tabasco sauce—neither of which is very spicy—but I like a combination of both. Now take your bowl and walk over to the microwave (which is next to the dessert table in case you didn’t know Usdan had one). Microwave it for forty seconds—if you put it in for too long the cheese turns to oily liquid, but if that’s what you’re into, then go for it. When it’s done cooking, stir it with a spoon until the cheese is evenly dispersed. You’ll love this delicious, spicy blob of cheesy rice so much you’ll be running back for seconds!