Boil some pasta--I like rotini or ziti, or other "short" pastas for this--and drain it. Add a decent splodge of butter (3 Tbsp or so? Depends on how much pasta you have, but generally one Tbsp butter per cup and a half of pasta) and some grated parmesan cheese (a little less than the butter) and mix well until the butter and cheese have melted. Salt and pepper to taste, and eat.
My mom used to pour warm milk over this so it was almost like a buttery pasta cereal. If you add only a small amount of milk at the same time as you add the butter and cheese you'll have an alfredo sauce.
Another:
Toss half a pound or so of lean ground beef (depends on how many people are eating) into a drying pan. Dust well with onion powder and garlic powder, and use a wooden spoon to break up the meat, mix in the powders. Turn on the heat and begin to brown the meat, adding a bit more powder along the way.
When the meat is about 2/3 brown, add several Tbsp of soy sauce and several Tbsp or Worcestershire sauce. Add a bit more of each power. Keep stirring and browning, adding a bit more of the sauces every couple of minutes or so, until it's all browned. When it is, add a bit more of everything and continue to cook another three minutes or so. The sauces will combine with the fat from the meat and make a thick sauce--there won't be a lot of it, but there will be some, and it adds some nice moisture.
Now. This is--because I'm allergic to peppers, and because I don't like cumin--what I use for beef tacos. (It is actually quite yummy, I promise.) So what I do at this point is have a quesadilla with it, usually, or put it into taco shells with whatever other taco fixings. But I've also done the following:
--mix it with melted cheddar or other Mexican cheese to make a really nice thick dip
--put it on a flour tortilla then sprinkle thickly with cheese to make a meat-inside quesadilla
--layer it with other ingredients (eg lettuce, refried beans, cheese, tomato chunks) for a seven-layer dip, or put tortilla chips in a bowl, dump this over, then add a ladleful or two of melted cheese etc. for nachos. Or, do the same but over a plate of french fries!
You can also:
--fill a piece of pita bread with it and any other sandwich fixings you might like
--stuff it into half-cooked breadrolls and then finish baking the rolls
--spoon it over a baked potato
--mix it with some crumbled feta cheese, and wrap heaping Tbsp of the mix in filo pastry, then bake for nifty little appetizers
--along the same lines, mix it with shredded cabbage and maybe some carrot or whatever else you like, add a little teriyaki sauce, and wrap it in won ton wrappers, which you can then shallow-fry to make interesting little "Asian" appetizers to serve with rice.
--and along those lines again, mix it with small chunks of potato, carrots, and peas, and a bit of gravy then roll out some puff pastry, cut it into small circles, and make little fold-over "pies/pasties" with it; bake them 20 minutes or so.
Not sure how "idiot-proof" a couple of those last ones are, but the point is that it's quite a tasty little beef mix, and you can do just about anything with it.
I've also in the past cooked pasta in beef stock, then cooked ground beef as above only instead of Worcestershire and soy, I used butter, rosemary, basil, thyme, oregano, and a bit of red wine (1/3 cup or so?) and a spoonful of tomato paste, and let it cook until the wine has reduced. (I usually "finish" the sauce with a tsp or so of arrowroot flour, which thickens the sauce and gives it a velvety consistency, but it's not necessary.) Then I drain the pasta and add the pasta to the beef pan, mixing it in well as I go, so the pasta soaks up and is well-coated with all of the lovely juices/sauce. Again, you can add whatever veg you want to it, if you want, and make sure you finish it with a LOT of good parmesan. It's a really easy pasta dish, something a little different from the "usual" tomato sauce, and it's one of those dishes I've pretty much always got the ingredients for on hand.
Hope some of those help!
