A North Carolina man who went on a mac-and-cheese run to the store ended up bringing home some serious cheddar.
Marquetton Carraway had serious hankering for some macaroni and cheese for dinner on Wednesday, so he hit the Madison Market Grill in his hometown of Goldsboro and bought a $5 Mega Buckets scratch-off lottery ticket while he was there.
"I was actually going to the store to by macaroni and cheese to cook,” Carraway told the North Carolina Education Lottery. "When I got to the counter, the man gave me my change and I was about to walk out the store until something told me to, ya know, buy a ticket."
Once he and scratched off the ticket after returning from the store, he realized the mac and cheese wasn't the only golden thing he brought home.
Carraway won $200,000 on the ticket, which worked out to $141,501 after federal and state tax withholdings.
The first thing he did was call his mother and sent her a picture of the ticket to make sure he wasn't "seeing things."
"At the time, she was on a business call,” Carraway said. “And I told her that her business was now over.”
He plans on using his winnings to buy a house and treat his family, after a mac-and-cheese run for the ages.
"Mac ’n’ cheese. Chicken wings and teriyaki sauce. Barbecue fixings. All some of the cravings that lottery winners have shared with us as they collected their prizes recently," a North Carolina Education Lottery spokesperson said in a statement to TODAY Food.
"Luck can happen anywhere, anytime, for any reason. It’s part of everyday life and we enjoy hearing what our winners were doing when they got lucky. We can’t guarantee that you’ll win a prize if you buy some snacks with your next lottery ticket, but that doesn’t stop our players from trying!"