Pasta

Pasta is another obvious staple, as are oriental noodles. I live near a Thai shop, so buy bagfuls of fettucine-thick egg-yellow and paler thread-thin noodles (which need a minute’s cooking) and fresh rice sticks, which don’t need to be cooked at all – you just steep them for 5–10 minutes in boiling water. (It doesn’t hurt to keep some cooked, cold-water-spritzed and drained egg noodles in a covered bowl in the fridge, either.) Any of these, with some soy sauce (as I say, I’m not salt-sensitive) lightly sprinkled over, are among the lowest-effort meals I can think of. Supermarkets sell various forms of Asian noodles now, so you don’t need access to exotically stocked, stall-sized shops, shelves piled with dried shrimp and sour pastes. But going to specialist stores makes shopping so pleasurable, and it’s cheaper. Sometimes I make small bowls of vaguely Japanese soup: stock, some chopped greens, manageable lengths of noodle. This, for my daughter, signals special food, partly because it’s food I make for myself (see here) and partly because it has seemed a treat ever since I took her to a Japanese restaurant and she ordered noodle soup and was given chopsticks to eat it with. She couldn’t really manage them, except singly as a kind of load-bearing punt, and I ended up feeding her, ferrying food, noodle by fat noodle, from bowl to hungry open mouth like a mother bird feeding her gaping-beaked young with worms.