If you've been to the grocery store lately, then you know. The shelves are bare and trying to put a damn meal together is positively maddening. You think you've got half a recipe set, and then the one major thing you need to make it work is gone. I mean, the store I went to yesterday was out of onions. Onions! How does anyone make anything without onions? Practically everything I make starts with a basic carrots-onions-celery soffrito! As if that weren't rough enough, we're renting a condo right now so I don't have access to the normal things that would be in a normal kitchen. Like any kind of seasonings or more than one sauce pan.

But, despite breaking down in tears at least twice yesterday, I am always up for a challenge. Many of my best recipes came from times when I was super broke or unable to go to the grocery store for some reason and had to make do with whatever was in my cabinet. I'm hanging with my parents for the month, so my dad asked me to make pasta with a pesto cream sauce, as that is one of his favorites and, conveniently, doesn't involve a ton of ingredients. Plus almost any other kind of pasta would require at least one onion. But alas! Not only did Publix not have onions, they also did not have normal heavy cream or normal pasta. Hell, they didn't even have any damned half-n-half. It was madness.

They did, however, have dairy-free heavy cream and gluten-free quinoa pasta. And so, despite being warned by many on Twitter that it wouldn't thicken and that it would be weird ... I made it work.