Noodles Day Quotes

The Quiet World In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day. When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way. Late at night, I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you. When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words, so I slowly whisper I love you thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe.

Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it's your last, or do you save your money on the chance you'll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this? Are we really all going to spend our last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in American is so unbelievable delicious? And what about chocolate?

The days shuffled by like bland schoolgirls. I didn’t notice their individual faces, only their basic uniform: day and night, day and night. I had no patience for showers or balanced meals. I did a lot of lying on floors — childish certainly, but when one can lie on floors without anyone seeing one, trust me, one will lie on a floor. I discovered, too, the fleeting yet discernible joy of biting into a Whitman’s chocolate and throwing the remaining half behind the sofa in the library. I could read, read, read until my eyes burned and the words floating like noodles in soup.

Come back here the day before yesterday, you noodle-legged weasel!

My period continued, an inevitable cycle, yet every month I was somehow surprised by the violent pain. It was as if I refused to believe my body, something I’d trusted for years, would repeatedly betray me. My stomach ate itself from the inside, a revelry I had been dragged to, a feast I was forced to join though I was not hungry. The meal lasted four to six days, gorging on cramps, the spilled crumbs falling out of me stained with raspberry jam. My stomach was never a clean eater, gnawing on my uterus and fallopian tubes, leaving bite marks. I counted each rotation of the sun with heightening anxiety until it passed and I reset the clock. The knife carved my insides into pot roasts; the fork jabbed my sides into holey cheese. I could distinguish each fork prong—the pain was profound. My guts twisted around the spoon like spaghetti, tangled noodles slathered in scarlet marinara. Menstruation was more smashed acidic tomatoes than sweet fruit compote. I wiped my fingers on white jeans made of napkins and left streaks dried to rust. The stains came out with bleach and detergent. I died and regenerated every month. How else could I define the experience? The reasonable explanation was death. I decided when my body was wheeled into the morgue, the coroner would declare I died of being a woman. Which was far better than dying of being a man.

It’s not every day the universe conspires to bring you face-to-face with someone who makes you think, Yes, you are my human.

We joked I would thrive in an apocalypse, because I was kind of scrappy, already used to living on noodles, and could probably be pretty happy talking to no one for days on end, if I had enough books around.

I ate noodles every day. After a week, I wanted a change and rang Kim to ask him the English word for bab. ‘Rice,’ he said. ‘Lice,’ I repeated. ‘Not lice, rice. They’re two different things. You must ask for rice.’ ‘Got it. Lice.

That's the detail of the dead woman I always remember: her bare left foot, along with packets of Top Ramen and a torn box of cat food strewn about as plastic bags danced in the wind of passing cars. I always think how, when she left the house that day, the last thing on that woman's mind must have been the possibility of dying on the pavement with dried noodles crowning her head. Maybe if she had paid more attention to detail, like the oncoming car, she would have made it home to feed her cat.

Fatness is a byproduct of the leisurely life your hard-working ancestors and the greatest minds of the Western world have been working to create for millennia They wanted you to have a life of plenty, a life without backbreaking work. Your great-great-great-grandfather would weep with joy at the sight of you half-conscious on a couch, having just shoveled a pile of fried noodles straight out of the takeout carton into your mouth after a busy day organizing the office's fantasy football league Surely my descendant has become a king!

Are we going to talk about this?" she asked. "You might want to avoid Aaron for a couple days." "That was already the plan," Dan said. "What the hell is going on?" "I'm doing what you asked me to do," Neil said. "I'm fixing them." "That's not what it looked like." Neil shrugged, poked his noodles, and restarted the timer. "If a bone isn't healing straight, you have no choice but to break it. They'll be fine." Matt leaned against the doorframe and arched a brow at Neil. "That's not exactly reassuring. From you 'fine' could mean anything from 'I'm going to hitchhike across the state' to 'I'm beaten to a bloody pulp but I can still hold a racquet'." "Did you bet on them?" Neil asked. Realizing Matt couldn't follow his train of thought, he said, "Aaron and Katelyn." "Everyone except Andrew bet on them," Matt said. "It's not a matter of them working out. It's a matter of when." Neil considered that. "Then they'll be fine.

I know people who read interminably, book after book, from page to page, and yet I should not call them 'well-read people'. Of course they 'know' an immense amount; but their brain seems incapable of assorting and classifying the material which they have gathered from books. They have not the faculty of distinguishing between what is useful and useless in a book; so that they may retain the former in their minds and if possible skip over the latter while reading it, if that be not possible, then--when once read--throw it overboard as useless ballast. Reading is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Its chief purpose is to help towards filling in the framework which is made up of the talents and capabilities that each individual possesses. Thus each one procures for himself the implements and materials necessary for the fulfilment of his calling in life, no matter whether this be the elementary task of earning one's daily bread or a calling that responds to higher human aspirations. Such is the first purpose of reading. And the second purpose is to give a general knowledge of the world in which we live. In both cases, however, the material which one has acquired through reading must not be stored up in the memory on a plan that corresponds to the successive chapters of the book; but each little piece of knowledge thus gained must be treated as if it were a little stone to be inserted into a mosaic, so that it finds its proper place among all the other pieces and particles that help to form a general world-picture in the brain of the reader. Otherwise only a confused jumble of chaotic notions will result from all this reading. That jumble is not merely useless, but it also tends to make the unfortunate possessor of it conceited. For he seriously considers himself a well-educated person and thinks that he understands something of life. He believes that he has acquired knowledge, whereas the truth is that every increase in such 'knowledge' draws him more and more away from real life, until he finally ends up in some sanatorium or takes to politics and becomes a parliamentary deputy. Such a person never succeeds in turning his knowledge to practical account when the opportune moment arrives; for his mental equipment is not ordered with a view to meeting the demands of everyday life. His knowledge is stored in his brain as a literal transcript of the books he has read and the order of succession in which he has read them. And if Fate should one day call upon him to use some of his book-knowledge for certain practical ends in life that very call will have to name the book and give the number of the page; for the poor noodle himself would never be able to find the spot where he gathered the information now called for. But if the page is not mentioned at the critical moment the widely-read intellectual will find himself in a state of hopeless embarrassment. In a high state of agitation he searches for analogous cases and it is almost a dead certainty that he will finally deliver the wrong prescription.

What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as her mood. No longer is Leopold, as he sits there, ruminating, chewing the cud of reminiscence, that staid agent of publicity and holder of a modest substance in the funds. He is young Leopold, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then is seen, precociously manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old house in Clambrassil street to the high school, his booksatchel on him bandolierwise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother's thought. Or it is the same figure, a year or so gone over, in his first hard hat (ah, that was a day!), already on the road, a fullfledged traveller for the family firm, equipped with an orderbook, a scented handkerchief (not for show only), his case of bright trinketware (alas, a thing now of the past!), and a quiverful of compliant smiles for this or that halfwon housewife reckoning it out upon her fingertips or for a budding virgin shyly acknowledging (but the heart? tell me!) his studied baisemoins. The scent, the smile but more than these, the dark eyes and oleaginous address brought home at duskfall many a commission to the head of the firm seated with Jacob's pipe after like labours in the paternal ingle (a meal of noodles, you may be sure, is aheating), reading through round horned spectacles some paper from the Europe of a month before. But hey, presto, the mirror is breathed on and the young knighterrant recedes, shrivels, to a tiny speck within the mist. Now he is himself paternal and these about him might be his sons. Who can say? The wise father knows his own child. He thinks of a drizzling night in Hatch street, hard by the bonded stores there, the first. Together (she is a poor waif, a child of shame, yours and mine and of all for a bare shilling and her luckpenny), together they hear the heavy tread of the watch as two raincaped shadows pass the new royal university. Bridie! Bridie Kelly! He will never forget the name, ever remember the night, first night, the bridenight. They are entwined in nethermost darkness, the willer and the willed, and in an instant (fiat!) light shall flood the world. Did heart leap to heart? Nay, fair reader. In a breath 'twas done but - hold! Back! It must not be! In terror the poor girl flees away through the murk. She is the bride of darkness, a daughter of night. She dare not bear the sunnygolden babe of day. No, Leopold! Name and memory solace thee not. That youthful illusion of thy strength was taken from thee and in vain. No son of thy loins is by thee. There is none to be for Leopold, what Leopold was for Rudolph.

The concept of shokunin, an artisan deeply and singularly dedicated to his or her craft, is at the core of Japanese culture. Japan’s most famous shokunin these days is Jiro Ono, immortalized in the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, but you will encounter his level of relentless focus across the entire food industry.

Kat happened to get a spot in the cafeteria line-up just behind the young woman lawyer who presented the case against her grandfather. She had removed her black robe too, and Kat found her much less threatening in her cream coloured jacket and trousers. The woman grabbed a carton of milk and then a tossed salad from behind the Plexiglas door. "Stay clear of the noodle soup," she said to Kat pleasantly. "It's vile." Kat smiled back at her. How odd that this woman could be so nice. It must all be in a day's work for her to tear apart and impoverish families. Kat grabbed some red Jell-O and a carton of orange juice for herself. She didn't really feel like eating: she was just going through the motions.

It's 10:00 a.m., time for the second round of baking of the day. After feeding the fire with chunks of maple, he loads the bread and pastries according to cooking time: first the fat country rounds, then long, skinny loaves dense with nuts and dried fruit, and finally a dozen purple crescent moons: raspberry croissants pocked with chunks of white chocolate.

The first time she wore her gi she also mistakenly wore her lucky Valentine's Day panties that showed through where she sweated like a boiled lobster in gauze. And last week in the turtle tot class where she loves to volunteer she bopped one of the cutest tots on the noggin with a foam noodle to get his guards up and he responded by throwing up on her feet. So there were setbacks.

Chang-bo took to his bed, or rather to the quilts on the floor that was all they had left. His legs swelled up like balloons with what Mrs. Song had come to recognize as edema — fluid retention brought on by starvation. He talked incessantly about food. He spoke of the tofu soups his mother made him as a child and an unusually delicious meal of steamed crab with ginger that Mrs. Song had cooked for him when they were newlyweds. He had an uncanny ability to remember details of dishes she had cooked decades earlier. He was sweetly sentimental, even romantic, when he spoke about their meals together. He would take her hand in his own, his eyes wet and cloudy with the mist of his memories. “Come, darling. Let’s go to a good restaurant and order a nice bottle of wine,” he told his wife one morning when they were stirring on the blankets. They hadn’t eaten in three days. Mrs. Song looked at her husband with alarm, worried that he was hallucinating. She ran out the door to the market, moving fast and forgetting all about the pain in her back. She was determined to steal, beg — whatever it took — to get some food for her husband. She spotted her older sister selling noodles. Her sister wasn’t faring well — her skin was flaked just like Chang-bo’s from malnutrition — so Mrs. Song had resisted asking her for help, but now she was desperate, and of course, her sister couldn’t refuse. “I’ll pay you back,” Mrs. Song promised as she ran back home, the adrenaline pumping her legs. Chang-bo was curled up on his side under the blanket. Mrs. Song called his name. When he didn’t respond, she went to turn him over — it wasn’t diffcult now that he had lost so much weight, but his legs and arms were stiff and got in the way. Mrs. Song pounded and pounded on his chest, screaming for help even as she knew it was too late.

There are succulent loins of fatty pork fried in scales of thin bread crumbs and served with bowls of thickened Worcestershire and dabs of fiery mustard. Giant pots of curry, dark and brooding as a sudden summer storm, where apples and onions and huge hunks of meat are simmered into submission over hours. Or days. There is okonomiyaki, the great geologic mass of carbs and cabbage and pork fat that would feel more at home on a stoner's coffee table than a Japanese tatami mat.

I can smell the shrimp broth and garlic! Mmm! It's so good! It's light yet has a deep, full-bodied flavor!" "Whoa! I've been eating all day, but this goes right down!" " Mm! This is the perfect finisher for the day!" "And the topping is the bun's pork filling!" "Yep! Listening to customer requests last night gave me the inspiration to try this out." "Thanks to these noodles, we sold a whole lot more today than yesterday." "Using bun dough to make noodles... how interesting! And to come up with it on the spot too..." "Nah, I didn't really. See, Taiwan already has a noodle dish a lot like it." "...? Dan Zai Noodles!" DAN ZAI NOODLES Originating in Southern Taiwan, it is also known as Tan-tsu noodles or slack season noodles. The broth is generally light and clear, made from seafood stocks like bonito or shrimp. Then oil noodles are added and topped with items like ground pork, green onions, bean sprouts and shrimp. Served in small snack-sized portions, it was created with the idea of being a tasty snack that could be eaten over and over.

and I look on my brain as a mass of hydraulically compacted thoughts, a bale of ideas, and my head as a smooth, shiny Aladdin’s lamp. How much more beautiful it must have been in the days when the only place a thought could make its mark was the human brain and anybody wanting to squelch ideas had to compact human heads, but even that wouldn’t have helped, because real thoughts come from outside and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words, inquisitors burn books in vain. If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself.

My mother was the first person you called for a recipe (a cup of onions, garlic, don’t forget the pinch of sugar) and the last one you called at night when you just couldn’t sleep (a cup of hot water with lemon, lavender oil, magnesium pills). She knew the exact ratio of olive oil to garlic in any recipe, and she could whip up dinner from three pantry items, easy. She had all the answers. I, on the other hand, have none of them, and now I no longer have her. “Hi,” I hear Eric say from inside. “Where is everyone?” Eric is my husband, and he is our last guest here today. He shouldn’t be. He should have been with us the entire time, in the hard, low chairs, stuck between noodle casseroles and the ringing phone and the endless lipstick kisses of neighbors and women who call themselves aunties, but instead he is here in the entryway to what is now my father’s house, waiting to be received. I close my eyes. Maybe if I cannot see him, he will stop looking for me. Maybe I will fold into this ostentatious May day, the sun shining like a woman talking loudly on a cell phone at lunch. Who invited you here? I tuck the cigarette into the pocket of my jeans. I cannot yet conceive of a world without her, what that will look like, who I am in her absence. I am incapable of understanding that she will not pick me up for lunch on Tuesdays, parking without a permit on the

I worked and worked, and before I knew it, my collage was finished. Still damp from Elmer’s glue, the masterpiece included images of horses--courtesy, coincidentally, of Marlboro cigarette ads--and footballs. There were pictures of Ford pickups and green grass--anything I could find in my old magazines that even remotely hinted at country life. There was a rattlesnake: Marlboro Man hated snakes. And a photo of a dark, starry night: Marlboro Man was afraid of the dark as a child. There were Dr Pepper cans, a chocolate cake, and John Wayne, whose likeness did me a great favor by appearing in some ad in Golf Digest in the early 1980s. My collage would have to do, even though it was missing any images depicting the less tangible things--the real things--I knew about Marlboro Man. That he missed his brother Todd every day of his life. That he was shy in social settings. That he knew off-the-beaten-path Bible stories--not the typical Samson-and-Delilah and David-and-Goliath tales, but obscure, lesser-known stories that I, in a lifetime of skimming, would never have hoped to read. That he hid in an empty trash barrel during a game of hide-and-seek at the Fairgrounds when he was seven…and that he’d gotten stuck and had to be extricated by firefighters. That he hated long pasta noodles because they were too difficult to eat. That he was sweet. Caring. Serious. Strong. The collage was incomplete--sorely lacking vital information.

In Tokyo, ramen is a playground for the culinary imagination. As long as the dish contains thin wheat noodles, it's ramen. In fact, there's a literal ramen playground called Tokyo Ramen Street in the basement of Tokyo Station, with eight top-rated ramen shops sharing one corridor. We stopped by one evening after a day of riding around on the Shinkansen. After drooling over the photos at establishments such as Junk Garage, which serves oily, brothless noodles hidden under a towering slag heap of toppings, we settled on Ramen Honda based on its short line and the fact that its ramen seemed to be topped with a massive pile of scallions. However, anything in Tokyo that appears to be topped with scallions is actually topped with something much better. You'll meet this delectable dopplegänger soon, and in mass quantities. The Internet is littered with dozens if not hundreds of exclamation point-bedecked ramen blogs (Rameniac, GO RAMEN!, Ramen Adventures, Ramenate!) in English, Japanese, and probably Serbian, Hindi, and Xhosa. In Tokyo, you'll find hot and cold ramen; Thai green curry ramen; diet ramen and ramen with pork broth so thick you could sculpt with it; Italian-inspired tomato ramen; and Hokkaido-style miso ramen. You'll find ramen chains and fiercely individual holes-in-the-wall. Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is having a meet-cute with her first bowl of ramen. As she fills up on pork and noodles and seaweed and bamboo shoots, she thinks, we were meant to be together, and she is embarrassed at her atavistic reaction to a simple bowl of soup.

To be a ramen writer of Kamimura's stature, you need to live in a ramen town, and there is unquestionably no town in Japan more dedicated to ramen than Fukuoka. This city of 1.5 million along the northern coast of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands, is home to two thousand ramen shops, representing Japan's densest concentration of noodle-soup emporiums. While bowls of ramen are like snowflakes in Japan, Fukuoka is known as the cradle of tonkotsu, a pork-bone broth made milky white by the deposits of fat and collagen extracted during days of aggressive boiling. It is not simply a specialty of the city, it is the city, a distillation of all its qualities and calluses. Indeed, tell any Japanese that you've been to Fukuoka and invariably the first question will be: "How was the tonkotsu?

In summer, most ramen restaurants in Tokyo serve hiyashi chūka, a cold ramen noodle salad topped with strips of ham, cucumber, and omelet; a tart sesame- or soy-based sauce; and sometimes other vegetables, like a tomato wedge or sheets of wakame seaweed. The vegetables are arranged in piles of parallel shreds radiating from the center to the edge of the plate like bicycle spokes, and you toss everything together before eating. It's bracing, ice-cold, addictive- summer food from the days before air conditioning. In Oishinbo: Ramen and Gyōza, a young lifestyle reporter wants to write an article about hiyashi chūka. "I'm not interested in something like hiyashi chūka," says my alter ego Yamaoka. It's a fake Chinese dish made with cheap industrial ingredients, he explains. Later, however, Yamaoka relents. "Cold noodles, cold soup, and cold toppings," he muses. "The idea of trying to make a good dish out of them is a valid one." Good point, jerk. He mills organic wheat into flour and hires a Chinese chef to make the noodles. He buys a farmyard chicken from an old woman to make the stock and seasons it with the finest Japanese vinegar, soy sauce, and sake. Yamaoka's mean old dad Kaibara Yūzan inevitably gets involved and makes an even better hiyashi chūka by substituting the finest Chinese vinegar, soy sauce, and rice wine. When I first read this, I enjoyed trying to follow the heated argument over this dish I'd never even heard of. Yamaoka and Kaibara are in total agreement that hiyashi chūka needs to be made with quality ingredients, but they disagree about what kind of dish it is: Chinese, Japanese, or somewhere in between? Unlike American food, Japanese cuisine has boundary issues.

Fukuoka, more than any other city in Japan, is responsible for ramen's rocket-ship trajectory, and the ensuing shift in Japan's cultural identity abroad. Between Hide-Chan, Ichiran, and Ippudo- three of the biggest ramen chains in the world- they've brought the soup to corners of the globe that still thought ramen meant a bag of dried noodles and a dehydrated spice packet. But while Ichiran and Ippudo are purveyors of classic tonkotsu, undoubtedly the defining ramen of the modern era, Hideto has a decidedly different belief about ramen and its mutability. "There are no boundaries for ramen, no rules," he says. "It's all freestyle." As we talk at his original Hide-Chan location in the Kego area of Fukuoka, a new bowl arrives on the table, a prototype for his borderless ramen philosophy. A coffee filter is filled with katsuobushi, smoked skipjack tuna flakes, and balanced over a bowl with a pair of chopsticks. Hideto pours chicken stock through the filter, which soaks up the katsuobushi and emerges into the bowl as clear as a consommé. He adds rice noodles and sawtooth coriander then slides it over to me. Compared with other Hide-Chan creations, though, this one shows remarkable restraint. While I sip the soup, Hideto pulls out his cell phone and plays a video of him layering hot pork cheeks and cold noodles into a hollowed-out porcelain skull, then dumping a cocktail shaker filled with chili oil, shrimp oil, truffle oil, and dashi over the top. Other creations include spicy arrabbiata ramen with pancetta and roasted tomatoes, foie gras ramen with orange jam and blueberry miso, and black ramen made with bamboo ash dipped into a mix of miso and onions caramelized for forty-five days.

Every few months or so at home, Pops had to have Taiwanese ’Mian. Not the Dan-Dan Mian you get at Szechuan restaurants or in Fuchsia Dunlop’s book, but Taiwanese Dan-Dan. The trademark of ours is the use of clear pork bone stock, sesame paste, and crushed peanuts on top. You can add chili oil if you want, but I take it clean because when done right, you taste the essence of pork and the bitterness of sesame paste; the texture is somewhere between soup and ragout. Creamy, smooth, and still soupy. A little za cai (pickled radish) on top, chopped scallions, and you’re done. I realized that day, it’s the simple things in life. It’s not about a twelve-course tasting of unfamiliar ingredients or mass-produced water-added rib-chicken genetically modified monstrosity of meat that makes me feel alive. It’s getting a bowl of food that doesn’t have an agenda. The ingredients are the ingredients because they work and nothing more. These noodles were transcendent not because he used the best produce or protein or because it was locally sourced, but because he worked his dish. You can’t buy a championship. Did this old man invent Dan-Dan Mian? No. But did he perfect it with techniques and standards never before seen? Absolutely. He took a dish people were making in homes, made it better than anyone else, put it on front street, and established a standard. That’s professional cooking. To take something that already speaks to us, do it at the highest level, and force everyone else to step up, too. Food at its best uplifts the whole community, makes everyone rise to its standard. That’s what that Dan-Dan Mian did. If I had the honor of cooking my father’s last meal, I wouldn’t think twice. Dan-Dan Mian with a bullet, no question.

The moonlight filtered through the trees like water from a strainer. Agatha’s hair was the color and consistency of wet noodles. I said she might look sexy as a redhead, and she asserted she’d be staying a creamy alfredo. I touched her tight skin they way a drummer might strum a guitar. She called me Mozart, and I didn’t know how to reply so I simply belched. Before I had finished, her open mouth was on mine, and she was huffing my essence like David Hasselhoff hoofing it to the liquor store. I remember what color panties she wore. They were transparent with the texture of flesh. I rubbed her back while she purred. Her skin was as soft as a fur coat. We made love for what seemed like days, but was in fact 3:58.95—a personal best for me. I felt like Roger Bannister, and she felt like a cheetah. Literally. I told her she’d look good on my rug, as a rug, and she playfully pinched the folds on my stomach. She explored my naval cavity with her pinky, and what started out as foreplay turned into a scavenger hunt. While she might have expected to find lint, nobody could have ever suspected she’d find the lost Templar treasure.

HERE ARE MY TEN BEEF NOODLE SOUP COMMANDMENTS: 1. Throw out the first: always flash-boil your bones and beef to get the “musk” out. I’ve gone back and forth on this a lot. I would sometimes brown the meat as opposed to boil, but decided in the end that for this soup, you gotta boil. If you brown, it’s overpowering. The lesson that beef noodle soup teaches you is restraint. Sometimes less is more if you want all the flavors in the dish to speak to you. 2. Make sure the oil is medium-high when the aromatics go down and get a slight caramelization. It’s a fine line. Too much caramelization and it becomes too heavy, but no caramelization and your stock is weak. 3. Rice wine can be tricky. Most people like to vaporize it so that all the alcohol is cooked off. I like to leave a little of the alcohol flavor ’cause it tends to cut through the grease a bit. 4. Absolutely no butter, lard, or duck fat. I’ve seen people in America try to “kick it up a notch” with animal fats and it ruins the soup. Peanut oil or die. 5. Don’t burn the chilis and peppercorns, not even a little bit. You want the spice and the numbness, but not the smokiness. 6. After sautéing the chilis/peppercorns, turn off the heat and let them sit in the oil to steep. This is another reason you want to turn the heat off early. 7. Strain your chilis/peppercorns out of the oil, put them in a muslin bag, and set them aside. Then add ginger/garlic/scallions to the oil in that order. Stage them. 8. I use tomatoes in my beef noodle soup, but I add them after the soup is finished and everything is strained. I let them hang out in the soup as it sits on the stove over the course of the day. I cut the tomatoes thin so they give off flavor without having to cook too long and so you can serve them still intact. 9. Always use either shank or chuck flap. Brisket is too tough. If you want to make it interesting, add pig’s foot or oxtail. 10. Do you. I don’t give you measurements with this because I gave you all the ingredients and the technique. The best part about beef noodle soup is that there are no rules. It just has to have beef, noodle, and soup. There are people that do clear broth beef noodle soup. Beef noodle soup with dairy. Beef noodle soup with pig’s blood. It would suck if you looked at my recipe and never made your own, ’cause everyone has a beef noodle soup in them. Show it to me.

The hot case at a kombini features tonkatsu, fried chicken, menchikatsu (a breaded hamburger patty), Chinese pork buns, potato croquettes, and seafood items such as breaded squid legs or oysters. In a bit of international solidarity, you'll see corn dogs, often labeled "Amerikandoggu." One day for lunch I stopped at 7-Eleven and brought home a pouch of "Gold Label" beef curry, steamed rice, inarizushi (sushi rice in a pouch of sweetened fried tofu), cold noodle salad, and a banana. Putting together lunch for the whole family from an American 7-Eleven would be as appetizing as scavenging among seaside medical waste, but this fun to shop for and fun to eat. Instant ramen is as popular in Japan as it is in college dorms worldwide, and while the selection of flavors is wider than at an American grocery, it serves a predictable ecological niche as the food of last resort for those with no money or no time. (Frozen ramen, on the other hand, can be very good; if you have access to a Japanese supermarket, look for Myojo Chukazanmai brand.) That's how I saw it, at least, until stumbling on the ramen topping section in the 7-Eleven refrigerator case, where you can buy shrink-wrapped packets of popular fresh ramen toppings such as braised pork belly and fermented bamboo shoots. With a quick stop at a convenience store, you can turn instant ramen into a serious meal. The pork belly is rolled and tied, braised, chilled, and then sliced into thick circular slices like Italian pancetta. This is one of the best things you can do with pork, and I don't say that lightly.

Kamimura has been whispering all week of a sacred twenty-four-hour ramen spot located on a two-lane highway in Kurume where truckers go for the taste of true ramen. The shop is massive by ramen standards, big enough to fit a few trucks along with those drivers, and in the midafternoon a loose assortment of castaways and road warriors sit slurping their noodles. Near the entrance a thick, sweaty cauldron boils so aggressively that a haze of pork fat hangs over the kitchen like waterfall mist. While few are audacious enough to claim ramen is healthy, tonkotsu enthusiasts love to point out that the collagen in pork bones is great for the skin. "Look at their faces!" says Kamimura. "They're almost seventy years old and not a wrinkle! That's the collagen. Where there is tonkotsu, there is rarely a wrinkle." He's right: the woman wears a faded purple bandana and sad, sunken eyes, but even then she doesn't look a day over fifty. She's stirring a massive cauldron of broth, and I ask her how long it's been simmering for. "Sixty years," she says flatly. This isn't hyperbole, not exactly. Kurume treats tonkotsu like a French country baker treats a sourdough starter- feeding it, regenerating, keeping some small fraction of the original soup alive in perpetuity. Old bones out, new bones in, but the base never changes. The mother of all ramen. Maruboshi Ramen opened in 1958, and you can taste every one of those years in the simple bowl they serve. There is no fancy tare, no double broth, no secret spice or unexpected toppings: just pork bones, noodles, and three generations of constant simmering. The flavor is pig in its purest form, a milky broth with no aromatics or condiments to mitigate the purity of its porcine essence.

It had been almost exactly four months since we’d met; four months since we’d locked glances in that bar; four months since his eyes and hair had made my knees turn to overcooked noodles. It had been four months since he’d failed to call me the next day, week, month. I’d moved on, of course, but the rugged image of Marlboro Man had left an indelible mark on my psyche. But I’d just begun my Chicago planning before I’d met him that night and had continued the next day. And now, at the end of April, I was just about set to go. “Oh, hi,” I said nonchalantly. I was leaving soon. I didn’t need this guy. “How’ve you been?” he continued. Yikes. That voice. It was gravelly and deep and whispery and dreamy all at the same time. I didn’t know until that moment that it had already set up permanent residence in my bones. My marrow remembered that voice. “Good,” I replied, focusing my efforts on appearing casual, confident, and strong. “I’m just gearing up to move to Chicago, actually.” “No kidding?” he said. “When are you going?” “Just a couple of weeks,” I replied. “Oh…” He paused. “Well…would you like to go out to dinner this week?” This was always the awkward part. I could never imagine being a guy. “Um, sure,” I said, not really seeing the point of going out with him, but also knowing it was going to be next to impossible for me to turn down a date with the first and only cowboy I’d ever been attracted to. “I’m pretty free all this week, so--” “How ’bout tomorrow night?” he cut in. “I’ll pick you up around seven.” He didn’t know it at the time, but that single take-charge moment, his instantaneous transformation from a shy, quiet cowboy to this confident, commanding presence on the phone, affected me very profoundly. My interest was officially ablaze.

Spaghetti alla puttanesca is typically made with tomatoes, olives, anchovies, capers, and garlic. It means, literally, "spaghetti in the style of a prostitute." It is a sloppy dish, the tomatoes and oil making the spaghetti lubricated and slippery. It is the sort of sauce that demands you slurp the noodles Goodfellas style, staining your cheeks with flecks of orange and red. It is very salty and very tangy and altogether very strong; after a small plate, you feel like you've had a visceral and significant experience. There are varying accounts as to when and how the dish originated- but the most likely explanation is that it became popular in the mid-twentieth century. The first documented mention of it is in Raffaele La Capria's 1961 novel, Ferito a Morte. According to the Italian Pasta Makers Union, spaghetti alla puttanesca was a very popular dish throughout the sixties, but its exact genesis is not quite known. Sandro Petti, a famous Napoli chef and co-owner of Ischian restaurant Rangio Fellone, claims to be its creator. Near closing time one evening, a group of customers sat at one of his tables and demanded to be served a meal. Running low on ingredients, Petti told them he didn't have enough to make anything, but they insisted. They were tired, and they were hungry, and they wanted pasta. "Facci una puttanata qualsiasi!" they cried. "Make any kind of garbage!" The late-night eater is not usually the most discerning. Petti raided the kitchen, finding four tomatoes, two olives, and a jar of capers, the base of the now-famous spaghetti dish; he included it on his menu the next day under the name spaghetti alla puttanesca. Others have their own origin myths. But the most common theory is that it was a quick, satisfying dish that the working girls of Naples could knock up with just a few key ingredients found at the back of the fridge- after a long and unforgiving night. As with all dishes containing tomatoes, there are lots of variations in technique. Some use a combination of tinned and fresh tomatoes, while others opt for a squirt of puree. Some require specifically cherry or plum tomatoes, while others go for a smooth, premade pasta. Many suggest that a teaspoon of sugar will "open up the flavor," though that has never really worked for me. I prefer fresh, chopped, and very ripe, cooked for a really long time. Tomatoes always take longer to cook than you think they will- I rarely go for anything less than an hour. This will make the sauce stronger, thicker, and less watery. Most recipes include onions, but I prefer to infuse the oil with onions, frying them until brown, then chucking them out. I like a little kick in most things, but especially in pasta, so I usually go for a generous dousing of chili flakes. I crush three or four cloves of garlic into the oil, then add any extras. The classic is olives, anchovies, and capers, though sometimes I add a handful of fresh spinach, which nicely soaks up any excess water- and the strange, metallic taste of cooked spinach adds an interesting extra dimension. The sauce is naturally quite salty, but I like to add a pinch of sea or Himalayan salt, too, which gives it a slightly more buttery taste, as opposed to the sharp, acrid salt of olives and anchovies. I once made this for a vegetarian friend, substituting braised tofu for anchovies. Usually a solid fish replacement, braised tofu is more like tuna than anchovy, so it was a mistake for puttanesca. It gave the dish an unpleasant solidity and heft. You want a fish that slips and melts into the pasta, not one that dominates it. In terms of garnishing, I go for dried oregano or fresh basil (never fresh oregano or dried basil) and a modest sprinkle of cheese. Oh, and I always use spaghetti. Not fettuccine. Not penne. Not farfalle. Not rigatoni. Not even linguine. Always spaghetti.

I have been all over the world cooking and eating and training under extraordinary chefs. And the two food guys I would most like to go on a road trip with are Anthony Bourdain and Michael Ruhlmann, both of whom I have met, and who are genuinely awesome guys, hysterically funny and easy to be with. But as much as I want to be the Batgirl in that trio, I fear that I would be woefully unprepared. Because an essential part of the food experience that those two enjoy the most is stuff that, quite frankly, would make me ralph. I don't feel overly bad about the offal thing. After all, variety meats seem to be the one area that people can get a pass on. With the possible exception of foie gras, which I wish like heckfire I liked, but I simply cannot get behind it, and nothing is worse than the look on a fellow foodie's face when you pass on the pate. I do love tongue, and off cuts like oxtails and cheeks, but please, no innards. Blue or overly stinky cheeses, cannot do it. Not a fan of raw tomatoes or tomato juice- again I can eat them, but choose not to if I can help it. Ditto, raw onions of every variety (pickled is fine, and I cannot get enough of them cooked), but I bonded with Scott Conant at the James Beard Awards dinner, when we both went on a rant about the evils of raw onion. I know he is often sort of douchey on television, but he was nice to me, very funny, and the man makes the best freaking spaghetti in tomato sauce on the planet. I have issues with bell peppers. Green, red, yellow, white, purple, orange. Roasted or raw. Idk. If I eat them raw I burp them up for days, and cooked they smell to me like old armpit. I have an appreciation for many of the other pepper varieties, and cook with them, but the bell pepper? Not my friend. Spicy isn't so much a preference as a physical necessity. In addition to my chronic and severe gastric reflux, I also have no gallbladder. When my gallbladder and I divorced several years ago, it got custody of anything spicier than my own fairly mild chili, Emily's sesame noodles, and that plastic Velveeta-Ro-Tel dip that I probably shouldn't admit to liking. I'm allowed very occasional visitation rights, but only at my own risk. I like a gentle back-of-the-throat heat to things, but I'm never going to meet you for all-you-can-eat buffalo wings. Mayonnaise squicks me out, except as an ingredient in other things. Avocado's bland oiliness, okra's slickery slime, and don't even get me started on runny eggs. I know. It's mortifying.

Here’s what I’d been observing: Big piles of bills. Parents whispering. Parents arguing. Stuff getting sold, like the silver teapot my grandma gave my mom and our laptop computer. The power going off for two days because we hadn’t paid the bill. Not much food except peanut butter and mac and cheese and Cup O Noodles. My mom digging under the couch cushions for quarters. My dad digging under the couch cushions for dimes. My mom borrowing toilet paper rolls from work.

Because for all my massive appetite, I cannot cook to save my life. When Grant came to my old house for the first time, he became almost apoplectic at the contents of my fridge and cupboards. I ate like a deranged college frat boy midfinals. My fridge was full of packages of bologna and Budding luncheon meats, plastic-wrapped processed cheese slices, and little tubs of pudding. My cabinets held such bounty as cases of chicken-flavored instant ramen noodles, ten kinds of sugary cereals, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, and cheap canned tuna. My freezer was well stocked with frozen dinners, heavy on the Stouffer's lasagna and bags of chicken tenders. My garbage can was a wasteland of take-out containers and pizza boxes. In my defense, there was also always really good beer and a couple of bottles of decent wine. My eating habits have done a pretty solid turnaround since we moved in together three years ago. Grant always leaved me something set up for breakfast: a parfait of Greek yogurt and homemade granola with fresh berries, oatmeal that just needs a quick reheat and a drizzle of cinnamon honey butter, baked French toast lingering in a warm oven. He almost always brings me leftovers from the restaurant's family meal for me to take for lunch the next day. I still indulge in greasy takeout when I'm on a job site, as much for the camaraderie with the guys as the food itself; doesn't look good to be noshing on slow-roasted pork shoulder and caramelized root vegetables when everyone else is elbow-deep in a two-pound brick of Ricobene's breaded steak sandwich dripping marinara.

I LEFT FULING on the fast boat upstream to Chongqing. It was a warm, rainy morning at the end of June—the mist thick on the Yangtze like dirty gray silk. A car from the college drove Adam and me down to the docks. The city rushed past, gray and familiar in the rain. The evening before, we had eaten for the last time at the Students’ Home. They kept the restaurant open late especially for us, because all night we were rushing around saying goodbye to everybody, and it was good to finally sit there and eat our noodles. We kidded the women about the new foreign devils who would come next fall to take our place, and how easily they could be cheated. A few days earlier, Huang Neng, the grandfather, had talked with me about leaving. “You know,” he said, “when you go back to your America, it won’t be like it is here. You won’t be able to walk into a restaurant and say, ‘I want a bowl of chaoshou.’ Nobody will understand you!” “That’s true,” I said. “And we don’t have chaoshou in America.” “You’ll have to order food in your English language,” he said. “You won’t be able to speak our Chinese with the people there.” And he laughed—it was a ludicrous concept, a country with neither Chinese nor chaoshou. After our last meal the family lined up at the door and waved goodbye, standing stiffly and wearing that tight Chinese smile. I imagined that probably I looked the same way—two years of friendship somehow tucked away in a corner of my mouth.

Atticus: I've been working there four fucking weeks! I'm going to be eating ramen noodles for the rest of my life. Asher: Never tried them. Atticus: Dude, fucking disgusting. Trust me. Asher: Matilda's making roast au jus for dinner tonight with those homemade Yorkshire puddings you like. Atticus: I hate you. Loathe. Despise. Basically every synonym for hate there is. Asher: Call me? My phone rang a minute later, and I whined long and loud into the receiver in place of saying hello. I'd been accused of being overly dramatic in the past. There might be some truth behind it. Asher chuckled. "You're pathetic." "Why have you not run away with me? We've been separated. I can't stand it. It's like the individual cells in my body are trying to divide again and make another you. It hurts. I can't do it twice." I whimpered again for emphasis. "Ash, I'm screwed, and not in the bend me over the hood of the Jag and pound my ass type of way. The bad way. The painful way. The oh-crap-my-bank-account-is-in-the-negative way. I'm fast running out of ideas, and you're over there living the high life and eating roast au jus with my goddamn Yorkshire puddings." "I get the sense you're trying to tell me something, but whatever it is, it's getting lost in translation. You're rambling. What's going on? Speak-a the English. What's the problem?" "What isn't the problem? I'm poor and miserable. I was not ready for adulthood this soon. Tell Mom and Dad it was all lies. It was a phase. I'm over it. Ha, good joke, right?" "Riiight, and how do you propose I magically make the burned image of your mouth around Ryan Vector's cock disappear from Matilda's mind?" "Fuck. You know what? We don't need a housekeeper. Fire her ass! Tell Mom and Dad she's a big fat liar who lies and hates me. Tell them she's stealing from them. She's an illegal immigrant! No, tell them, she's a housekeeper by day and a hooker by night. I saw her walking the streets of Fifth Avenue after sundown in a mini skirt and fishnet stockings." I paused, envisioning our sixty-year-old housekeeper/used-to-be-nanny in that kind of attire. Asher and I both audibly ewwed at the exact same time. "Dude, that's fucking gross as shit, and you know it. I just threw up in my mouth. Why would you put that image in my head?" "I regret many of my life decisions. Add it to the list. Ash, I'm serious. Just make something up. Get rid of her. We don't need a housekeeper, and we're long past requiring a nanny. Especially one who walks into rooms without knocking. What was she thinking?" "The door wasn't closed." "Not the time, Ash!" "Okay, so let's pretend for five minutes Matilda dies in a horrible car crash." "We could make that happen.

And every day at dinner time, I’d bring homemade chicken noodle soup up to your bedroom.” I still remember that soup. It was so good. I began to look forward to it every day. Even on the days I had no appetite, that soup warmed me up and made me smile. “I remember that. I loved it.” My mother pulls back to find my eyes, a knowing smile stretching across her pretty face. She leans in to kiss my hairline, then whispers, “That soup was from Dean.

It's something I'm seeing everywhere in Vietnam; what makes its food so good, its people so endearing and impressive: pride. It's everywhere. From top to bottom, everyone seems be doing the absolute best they can with what they have, improvising, repairing, innovating. It's a spirit revealed in every noodle stall, every leaky sampan, every swept and combed dirt porch and green rice paddy. You see it in the mud-packed dikes and levees of their centuries-old irrigation system, every monkey bridge, restored shoe, tire turned sandal, literless urban street, patched roof, and swaddled baby in brightly colored hand-knit cap. Think what you want about Vietnam and about communism and about whatever it was that really happened there all those years ago. Ignore, if you care to, the obvious - that the country is, and was always, primarily about family, village, province, and then country - that ideology is a luxury few can afford. You cannot help but be impressed and blown away by the hard work, the attention to detail, the care taken in every facet of daily life, no matter how mundane, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Spend some time in the Mekong Delta and you'll understand how a nation of farmers could beat the largest and most powerful military presence on the planet. Just watch the women in the rice paddies, bent at the waist for eight, ten hours a day, yanking bundles of rice from knee-deep water, then moving them, replanting them. Take a while to examine the interlocked system of stone-age irrigation, unchanged for hundreds and hundreds of years, the level of cooperation necessary among neighbors simply to scratch out a living, and you'll get the idea.

After only a few days, the novelty of a return to dried noodles had already worn off. The valley opened ahead, miles of flat ash and shale between the waves of mountains. We walked on, in an endless space where time and possibility seemed endless.

The aunts had their schedule, to which they kept no matter what. They took their walk in the morning, then read and wrote in their journals, then had lunch - the same lunch every day - mashed parsnips and potatoes, noodle pudding, and apple tart for dessert. They napped in the afternoon and did their business at twilight, should anybody come to the backdoor. They always had their supper in the kitchen - beans and toast, soup and crackers - and they kept the lights turned low, to save on electricity.

Once she’d finished, she walked over to a garbage can to throw away the paper plate and cup; but, glancing inside it, she noticed a mass of flies gathered on a pile of noodles. If the bags ripped where she left them, she thought, the flies would come like this. The bits of flesh would rot, the flies would come, and then maggots…. Her mouth filled with a sour taste and, not for the first time that day, she felt like throwing up. She needed to get home and rest as soon as possible. Lighting a menthol cigarette, she set off across the wet grass.

Rural Free Delivery (RFD) Home, upon that word drops the sunshine of beauty and the shadow of tender sorrows, the reflection of ten thousand voices and fond memories. This is a mighty fine old world after all if you make yourself think so. Look happy even if things are going against you— that will make others happy. Pretty soon all will be smiling and then there is no telling what can’t be done. Coca-Cola Girl Mother baked a fortune cake pale yellow icing, lemon drops round rim, hidden within treasures, a ring—you’ll be married, a button—stay a bachelor, a thimble—always a spinster, and a penny—you’re rich. Gee, but I am hungry. Wait a second, dear, until I pull my belt up another notch. There that’s better. So, you see, Hon, I am straighter than a string around a bundle. You ought to see my eye, it’s a peach. I am proud of it, looks like I’ve been kicked by a mule. You know, dear, that they can kick hard enough to knock all the soda out of a biscuit without breaking the crust Hogging Catfish This gives you a fighting chance. Noodle your right hand into their gills, hold on tight while you grunt him out of the water. This can be a real dogfight. Old river cat wants to go down deep, make you bottom feed. Like I said, boys, when you tell a whopper, say it like you believe it. Saturday Ritual My Granddad was a cobbler. We each owned two pairs of shoes, Sunday shoes and everyday shoes. When our Sunday shoes got worn they became our everyday shoes. Main Street Saturday Night We each were given a dime on Saturday opening a universe of possibilities. All the stores stayed open and people flocked into town. Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds set up a popcorn stand on Reinheimer’s corner and soon after lighting a little stove, sounding like small firecrackers, popping began. Dad, laughing shooting the breeze with a group of farmers, drinking Coca Cola, finding out if any sheds needed to be built or barns repaired, discussing the price of next year’s seed, finding out who’s really working, who’s just looking busy. There is no object I wouldn’t give to relive my childhood growing up in Delavan— where everyone knew everyone— and joy came with but a dime. Market Day Jim Pittsford’s grocery smelled of bananas ripening and the coffee he ground by hand, wonderful smoked ham and bacon fresh sliced. He’d reward the child who came to pick up the purchase, with a large dill pickle Biking home, skillfully balancing Jim Pittsford’s bacon, J B’s tomatoes and peaches, while sniffing a tantalizing spice rising from fresh warm rolls, I nibbled my pickle reward.

Peanut-Lime Dressing Makes about 1 3/4 cups 1/4 cup freshly squeezed lime juice 1 tablespoon fish sauce 1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar 1 teaspoon soy sauce 1 tablespoon finely grated ginger 1/4 cup peanut butter 1/2 jalapeño pepper, stemmed and sliced 3 tablespoons neutral-tasting oil 1 garlic clove, sliced Optional: 1/4 cup coarsely chopped cilantro leaves Place all the ingredients in a blender or food processor and blend until smooth. Thin with water to desired consistency—leave it thick to use as a dip, and thin it out to dress salads, vegetables, or meat. Taste with a leaf of lettuce, then adjust salt and acid as needed. Refrigerate leftovers, covered, for up to 3 days. Ideal for cucumbers, rice or soba noodles, romaine, and serving alongside grilled or roasted chicken, steak, or pork.

Inside an H Mart complex, there will be some kind of food court, an appliance shop, and a pharmacy. Usually, there's a beauty counter where you can buy Korean makeup and skin-care products with snail mucin or caviar oil, or a face mask that vaguely boasts "placenta." (Whose placenta? Who knows?) There will usually be a pseudo-French bakery with weak coffee, bubble tea, and an array of glowing pastries that always look much better than they taste. My local H Mart these days is in Elkins Park, a town northeast of Philadelphia. My routine is to drive in for lunch on the weekends, stock up on groceries for the week, and cook something for dinner with whatever fresh bounty inspires me. The H Mart in Elkins Park has two stories; the grocery is on the first floor and the food court is above it. Upstairs, there is an array of stalls serving different kinds of food. One is dedicated to sushi, one is strictly Chinese. Another is for traditional Korean jjigaes, bubbling soups served in traditional earthenware pots called ttukbaegis, which act as mini cauldrons to ensure that your soup is still bubbling a good ten minutes past arrival. There's a stall for Korean street food that serves up Korean ramen (basically just Shin Cup noodles with an egg cracked in); giant steamed dumplings full of pork and glass noodles housed in a thick, cakelike dough; and tteokbokki, chewy, bite-sized cylindrical rice cakes boiled in a stock with fish cakes, red pepper, and gochujang, a sweet-and-spicy paste that's one of the three mother sauces used in pretty much all Korean dishes. Last, there's my personal favorite: Korean-Chinese fusion, which serves tangsuyuk---a glossy, sweet-and-sour orange pork---seafood noodle soup, fried rice, and black bean noodles.

Grains are the foundation of their diet. Japanese people eat white rice every day, sometimes adding noodles. Rice is the primary food in Okinawa, as well.

Like all energy, carbohydrates are never created nor destroyed. Every noodle will eventually rest in the end, having found its purpose, and will become free, but not until the universe is painfully ripped apart in a bloody apocalypse.

The reason it’s more beneficial to aim for quantity is because most of us are smart but lazy creatures who will find and take any available shortcut. If you commit to “getting better at songwriting,” you might noodle around on your guitar for twenty minutes here and there. If you commit to “writing a song every day from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m.,” you’ll write a lot more songs and they’ll be better. Also, what does it even look like to aim for quality? Sitting at your desk and declaring “Time to make something really good!” as you crack your knuckles? While there will always need to be space in your process for refining your work, the tendency for most is to get caught in a perfectionism spiral where things are never good enough and we’re spending forever on something we’re treating too preciously. By aiming for quantity, you force yourself to make bold decisions and move on. Quantity can be measured. You know when you’re hitting your goals. And usually, the more quantity there is, the more quality there will be.

He rushed back to the phone and dialed a number from memory. In a few seconds, the kitchen phone in a noodle house in Lhasa’s Chengguan District would ring, but only once before Olen promptly hung up. He waited thirty seconds and then dialed a second number, this one belonging to a low-end hotel in Dagzê County. He disconnected after two short rings.

On one of those nights in January 2014, we sat next to each other in Maria Vostra, happy and content, smoking nice greens, with one of my favorite movies playing on the large flat-screen TVs: Once Upon a Time in America. I took a picture of James Woods and Robert De Niro on the TV screen in Maria Vostra's cozy corner, which I loved to share with Martina. They were both wearing hats and suits, standing next to each other. Robert de Niro looked a bit like me and his character, Noodles, (who was a goy kid in the beginning of the movie, growing up with Jewish kids) on the picture, was as naive as I was. I just realized that James Woods—who plays an evil Jewish guy in the movie, acting like Noodles' friend all along, yet taking his money, his woman, taking away his life, and trying to kill him at one point—until the point that Noodles has to escape to save his life and his beloved ones—looks almost exactly like Adam would look like if he was a bit older. “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.” – William Shakespeare That sounds like an ancient spell or rather directions, instructions to me, the director instructing his actors, being one of the actors himself as well, an ancient spell, that William Shakespeare must have read it from a secret book or must have heard it somewhere. Casting characters for certain roles to act like this or like that as if they were the director’s custom made monsters. The extensions of his own will, desires and actions. The Reconquista was a centuries-long series of battles by Christian states to expel the Muslims (Moors), who had ruled most of the Iberian Peninsula since the 8th century. The Reconquista ended on January 2, 1492. The same year Columbus, whose statue stands atop a Corinthian custom-made column down the Port at the bottom of the Rambla, pointing with his finger toward the West, had discovered America on October 12, 1492. William Shakespeare was born in April 1564. He had access to knowledge that had been unavailable to white people for thousands of years. He must have formed a close relationship with someone of royal lineage, or used trick, who then permitted him to enter the secret library of the Anglican Church. “A character has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure what he/she’s supposed to be doing.” – Anthony Burgess Martina proudly shared with me her admiration for the Argentine author Julio Cortazar, who was renowned across South America. She quoted one of his famous lines, saying: “Vida es como una cebolla, hay que pelarla llorando,” which translates to “Life is like an onion, you have to peel it crying.” Martina shared with me her observation that the sky in Europe felt lower compared to America. She mentioned that the clouds appeared larger in America, giving a sense of a higher and more expansive sky, while in Europe, it felt like the sky had a lower and more limiting ceiling. “The skies are much higher in Argentina, Tomas, in all America. Here in Europe the sky is so low. In Argentina there are huge clouds and the sky is huge, Tomas.” – Martina Blaterare “It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.” – George Orwell, 1984

If I was going to make it to that one day, it would require sacrifices like blue box mac ’n’ cheese and ramen noodles.

He detected a faint hint of tonkatsu in the broth, but the base was definitely chicken rather than pig bones. The broth wasn't quite transparent, but it was a great deal clearer than the turbid liquid that usually accompanied ramen these days. It seemed quite possible there was some kind of fish stock in there too. A garlicky, gingery aroma rose from the bowl. The noodles were the thin, straight type, and cooked slightly on the firm side. On top of them lay two slices of roast pork and another two of kamaboko fish cake. These were accompanied by bean sprouts, pickled bamboo shoots, and negi onion.

The expression in Steven’s eyes showed both understanding and amusement, and he watched with undisguised interest as Emma hastily covered her still-pulsing bosom. “I know,” he sighed, with a crooked, teasing grin. “You’re not that kind of girl.” Emma knew her face was crimson with embarrassment and umbrage, and only then, when it was too late, did she think to do her buttoning with her back turned. “I most certainly am not!” “You liked it,” Steven said, settling back with a smug sigh. “And from now until the day I take you, you’re going to be wondering what else I might have made you feel.” “You are insufferably arrogant, Mr. Fairfax!” “But right, nonetheless,” he responded easily. And then he had the bald effrontery to yawn. “You’re all warm and wet, and certain parts of you are feeling downright disappointed, whether you’ll admit to the fact or not.” A lame protest died in her throat. Everything Steven said was true, and she couldn’t deny it because she knew he’d see through the lie. “Emma the librarian,” he said huskily. Then he chuckled as though he found her occupation extraordinarily humorous. Emma’s knees felt weak as noodles, and a soft whimper rose in her throat at the brazen truth of his words. She swallowed it. “You overestimate your appeal, Mr. Fairfax,” she said. And then she turned on one heel and left the room, slamming the door shut behind her. Only

My menu for this trip was pretty simple, mirroring the multi-day menu I typically use on longer backpacking trips. For dinner: ramen noodles cooked in miso soup with a 1 oz shot of olive oil for extra calories and fat (700-1400 calories.) Breakfast: pound cake or other quick bread, smashed flat to save space, and packed in plastic bags (1000 calories.) 3 snacks per day consisting of Snickers, cookies, salami and crackers, Cliff bars, nuts, or licorice (1000-1500 calories.)

In the days before computers and emails,” she explained, “people used to write messages on paper and send them to each other using a fax machine. It’s sort of like sending a photograph through a telephone line. Hardly anyone uses a fax these days. They’re very old fashioned,” she continued, “but they used to be very popular once upon a time. Lots of little children used to send their letters to Santa that way.” "Wow!” said Poppy Noodle. “That sounds like Magic.” “No,” answered Flora sharply. “That’s not Magic, that’s technology. Never confuse the two.

Saturday afternoon she deboned chicken breasts and put the raw meat aside; then she simmered the bones with green onions and squashed garlic and ginger. She mixed ground pork with diced water chestnuts and green onions and soy sauce and sherry, stuffed the wonton skins with this mixture, and froze them to be boiled the next day. Then she made the stuffing for Richard's favorite egg rolls. It was poor menu planning- Vivian would never have served wontons and egg rolls at the same meal- but she felt sorry for Richard, living on hot dogs as he'd been. Anyway they all liked her egg rolls, even Aunt Barbara. Sunday morning she stayed home from church and started the tea eggs simmering (another source of soy sauce for Annie). She slivered the raw chicken breast left from yesterday- dangling the occasional tidbit for J.C., who sat on her stool and cried "Yeow!" whenever she felt neglected- and slivered carrots and bamboo shoots and Napa cabbage and more green onions and set it all aside to stir-fry at the last minute with rice stick noodles. This was her favorite dish, simple though it was, and Aunt Rubina's favorite; it had been Vivian's favorite of Olivia's recipes, too. (Vivian had never dabbled much in Chinese cooking herself.) Then she sliced the beef and asparagus and chopped the fermented black beans for her father's favorite dish.

The view from the apartment’s one window was of another building’s gray ferroconcrete wall, which was intermittently lit by the white neon flicker from the Ringer Hut noodle shop sign across the street. As

I WAS JUST SITTING DOWN TO DINNER THAT NIGHT WHEN MY cell phone began to chime. It was leftover night, which was not a bad thing at our house, since it allowed me to sample two or three of Rita’s tasty concoctions at one sitting, and I stared at the phone for several seconds and thought very hard about the last piece of Rita’s Tropical Chicken sitting there on the platter before I finally picked up my phone and answered. “It’s me,” Deborah said. “I need a favor.” “Of course you do,” I said, looking at Cody as he pulled a large helping of Thai noodles out of the serving dish. “But does it have to be right now?” Debs made a sound somewhere between a hiss and a grunt. “Ow. Yeah, it does. Can you pick up Nicholas from day care?” she said. Her son, Nicholas, was enrolled at a Montessori day-care center in the Gables, although I was reasonably sure he was too young to count beads. I had wondered whether I should be doing the same for Lily Anne, but Rita had pooh-poohed the idea. She said it was a waste of money until a child was two or three years old. For Deborah, though, nothing was too good for her little boy, so she cheerfully shelled out the hefty fee for the school. And she had never been late to pick him up, no matter how pressing her workload—but here it was, almost seven o’clock, and Nicholas was still waiting for Mommy. Clearly something unusual was afoot, and her voice sounded strained—not angry and tense as it had been earlier, but not quite right, either. “Um, sure, I guess I can get him,” I said. “What’s up with you?” She made the hiss-grunt sound again and said, “Uhnk. Damn it,” in a kind of hoarse mutter, before going on in a more normal voice, “I’m in the hospital.” “What?” I said. “Why, what’s wrong?” I had an alarming vision of her as I had seen her in her last visit to the hospital, an ER trip that had lasted for several days as she lay near death from a knife wound. “It’s no big deal,” she said, and there was strain in her voice, as well as fatigue. “It’s just a broken arm. I just … I’m going to be here for a while and I can’t get Nicholas in time.

According to tradition, there’s a celebration bigger than Twin Sun Day. We eat special foods like spiral-shaped noodles. School is canceled. Do you know how rare it is for school to be canceled in the Fire Nation?

There is a concerted push by some international countries to rename France, 'Little China'. Yes, it's set to be the new home of instant noodles.

Oh, I’m Camilla’s partner. But I can’t stay.” “I see! Lovely to meet you,” said the Angel, unaware of how her eyebrows betrayed her, like everyone else in the world to Nona seemed unaware of how their eyebrows betrayed them, by immediately saying plain as day: Camilla?? Really??? Camilla??? Which Nona thought was unfair: Crown was very nearly pretty enough for Camilla. “Nona, can you take Noodle for a moment? I’ve got to get the tuning forks and he’s going to make the most unrighteous howl, he can’t stand the things. When she had passed the leash to Nona and gone through the door with one last look at Crown, Nona crouched to give Noodle her hand to lick, and said accusingly: “If Camilla hears you said that, she’ll be furious.” “That’s probably why I said it,” admitted Crown, with genuine contrition. “I have a ripple of evil running through my soul—I know I do. But it wasn’t that bad a lie, was it, Nona? Don’t you think it’ll raise Cam’s status? Don’t you think I’ve done her a favour?” Nona thought about it. “Camilla doesn’t need raising. You could have raised my status by saying you were mine,” she added. “They would have believed it—we’re both very attractive.

How much to ride the merry-go-round?” said someone familiar. It was the Angel. The Angel and Pash appeared in front of Nona’s chair, before the truck, and with them—most wonderfully—Noodle; Noodle sitting on the ground, opening his mouth and panting, closing his mouth and rolling his eyes with displeasure, obviously as past the events of the day as Nona herself. Pyrrha said with a flicker of old humor—“How much to get off?” “More than we can afford, I guess,” said the Angel. “Sometimes I feel as though I were born on the merry-go-round—I worry I won’t know what to do with myself when it stops. If it ever stops.

There was a mailman I loved as a little girl. He would stop at the communal mailbox On the street In the center of the apartment complex And begin sorting mail away Into 150 different little boxes We lived in 1202 I would rush from my house To greet the mailman And he would talk to me as he worked Filing away bills and cards and coupons He would ask me questions Quiz me And give me a piece of Bazooka gum For every question I got right I would spin around and crush my sneakers rocking up and down on my toes I would curl one piece of hair Around my finger while I thought of the answers I would slide my tongue between my teeth and the windows where they were missing And between every mailbox The mailman would look at me and smile He’d pat me on the cheek And tell me That I was as smart as he was. As smart as any man. And I believed him. Because why wouldn’t I? I was 8. I knew that George Bush would win the election. I knew the Pythagorean theorem. I read 300 books from the public library And I could draw every animal by memory. I liked him ’cause he gave me chewing gum And talked to me in his low voice Calm and soft Not the shrill, high-pitched voice They would use on my baby brother. One day the mailman didn’t show up for work I ran out and stopped in my tracks There was a different man there I asked if my friend was sick The imposter ignored me The new mailman showed up a few days in a row The kids in the neighborhood said The old one had a heart attack in a bowl of spaghetti And died with noodles up his nose I cried One Wednesday I ran out to the new mailman And asked if he had any gum He told me to stay away Because he didn’t want to get in trouble like Charlie I didn’t know my friend’s name was Charlie And I didn’t know how I could have gotten him in trouble So I asked my mom How you could give someone a heart attack And she rubbed her head and stretched her feet across the couch and said, “It feels like you’re gonna give me one right now.” I didn’t want my mom to die too. So I hid in my room And I cried Because I was 8 And a murderer.

Then perhaps I would have been as free as they are. I would love to be on my own, living with a roommate, ordering noodles at 2 a.m., waking up deliciously alone, with no one to ask what my plan is for the day.

But kids who are meant to one day go to expensive American universities don't need to learn about Hong Kong. The physical cityscape of Hong Kong exists but for your amusement. You need to know only enough so that when you are an adult, you can make clever memes about which section of the minibus to sit in so that the driver can hear you when you need to alight, or what spice level of broth to get at our most beloved noodle joint.

Well, the rain made them a mess, the flowers, half of them bald of petals and the stems weak as noodles, and I was beginning to think that flowers were a silly idea, that you'd think, I don't know what, but I kept them all week because the last couple of days I couldn't escape to come and explain, and yesterday the flowers just flat died. So when I left today I didn't have any flowers, and wasn't sure I'd find you anyhow, so I grabbed what I could find, and it was food.

The noodle/worm idea was appealing to me. I hadn't made pasta in the competition yet. And noodle kugel was a traditional Jewish dish that held tight to my heart... and could also be made to look extremely disturbing. To be honest, it could be a little gross-looking on the best of days. Noodles submerged in a creamy cheese base, some of them sticking up top to get crispy in the oven. Raisins or other fruits flecking the kugel like little bugs. Maybe I could make the whole thing graveyard-themed. If I was going to make something so rich and heavy and creamy, my other dish should balance it out by being light and savory. And spooky, of course. Maybe organ meats? Chicken feet were extremely scary-looking, maybe with some kind of beet sauce...

return home. If there was not enough work to go around on a particular day, he’d drop into the synagogue, recite a couple of psalms, listen to the ongoing discussion of the Mishnah or the hair-splitting arguments over a page of the Gemara, the concluding sections of the Talmud. At the end of the day, he would enjoy a cooked dairy noodle supper, read the bedtime prayers and go to sleep. A few years after the family had become entrenched back into life in Biržai, Moishe realized Berl-David was ready to join him in his daily routine. “Berl,” he called to him. “Do you remember the time in Kazan when I was almost killed? Well, let me remind you,” he said before Berl could answer. “Shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Tatars tried to kill me because of my business dealings. But a Russian saved me from certain death. Do you know why that happened?” “No,

Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it’s your last, or do you save your money on the chance you’ll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this?

Serves 10 to 12 1 onion, chopped 1 small head of garlic, all cloves chopped or pressed 8 ounces mushrooms, sliced 1 head broccoli, chopped 2 carrots, chopped 2 red bell peppers, seeded and chopped 1 can corn, rinsed and drained 1 package Silken Lite tofu ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper 1 teaspoon oregano 1 teaspoon basil 1 teaspoon rosemary 2 jars pasta sauce (see E2-Approved Foods) 2 boxes whole grain lasagna noodles 16 ounces frozen spinach, thawed and drained 2 sweet potatoes, cooked and mashed 6 roma tomatoes, sliced thin 1 cup raw cashews, ground

A few days before the club, Stevie and Erin produced the wares of their dumpster dives. New potatoes, udon noodles, shiitake mushrooms, raspberry doughnuts, baked meringues, feta cheese, frozen peas, farfalle pasta, tomato puree, tinned salmon, plus a load of day-old radishes. "The most important part of any dumpster dive," Erin said, moving her hand expansively over the food, "is showing off what you have found." I processed the food as she'd taught me: cleaning the packaging with diluted bleach and soaking the vegetables in a vinegar-water solution. In the large chrome restaurant kitchen, I spread it all out across the counter and thought about what I'd make. We had bought just one extra ingredient: enormous cuts of T-bone steak. We thought red meat should be a prerequisite for all Supper Clubs. An element of spontaneity had also been agreed on, with no set menu, no dietary requirements- just eat whatever's in front of you and be sure to eat it all. The plan was to spend all night at the restaurant, waiting hours between courses. I made grilled potatoes and spiced salmon for the first course. I roasted radishes and topped them with crumbled feta for the second. Cold noodle salad with shiitake mushrooms and peas for the third, and T-bone steaks cooked rare, with a side of garlic-tomato pasta, for the main course. For dessert I made a strange sort of Eton mess, with chunks of torn doughnuts and smashed meringue covered in cream and sugar.

Sure you don't want another helping?" I made a classic French blanquette de veau, an old-school veal stew with a white wine sauce, served over wide pappardelle noodles that I tossed with butter, lemon zest, and chives, and some steamed green beans. I also made a loaf of crusty bread using the no-knead recipe that everyone is doing these days and is so simple and so delicious. "I think three plates is plenty!" Glenn laughs. "Besides, I'm pretty sure I saw some dessert in there, so I had better leave a sliver of room." "You got me there." I made a fallen chocolate soufflé cake filled with chocolate mousse. Mrs. O'Connor always talked about being married to a chocoholic: apparently Glenn believes that if it isn't chocolate, it isn't dessert. While he will happily eat any dessert placed in front of him, from fruit pies to vanilla ice cream, if there is no chocolate, he will literally stop on the way home for a Hershey bar or a drive-through chocolate milk shake.

For dinner, he serves dishes such as raw local fish accented with touches like fresh basil and balsamic vinegar; roasted pumpkin soup laced with ishiri; fat, chewy handmade spaghetti with tender rings of squid on a puddle of ink enhanced with another few drops of fish sauce. It's what Italian food would be if Italy were a windswept peninsula in the Far East. If dinner is Ben's personal take on Noto ingredients, breakfast still belongs to his in-laws. It's an elaborate a.m. feast, fierce in flavor, rich in history, dense with centuries of knowledge passed from one generation to the next: soft tofu dressed with homemade soy and yuzu chili paste; soup made with homemade miso and simmered fish bones; shiso leaves fermented kimchi-style, with chilies and ishiri; kaibe, rice mixed with ishiri and fresh baby squid, pressed into patties and grilled slowly over a charcoal fire; yellowtail fermented for six months, called the blue cheese of the sea for its lactic funk. The mix of plates will change from one morning to the next but will invariably include a small chunk of konka saba, mackerel fermented for up to five years, depending on the day you visit. Even when it's broken into tiny pieces and sprinkled over rice, the years of fermentation will pulse through your body like an electric current.

The prison restaurant, just outside the barbed wire, is a big local draw, both for the built-in gimmick of being staffed by prisoners, as part of their culinary training, and for the quality of the food. Today there’s a popular local TV show filming here, interviewing officers stationed by the ladies’ room and hungry patrons devouring noodles. At the table, doily place mats, quilted pink menus, and matching pink chopstick holders mark each seat. Waitresses in pink dresses, sporting those same affectless looks I’d faced all day, take our order and place spicy papaya salad and pad thai before us. Next door the gift shop sells prisoner-made goods and also doubles as a massage parlor. Rifling through pillows, place mats, and purses embroidered with little Thai girls at the playground, trying to determine if making purchases would constitute supporting the prison system or, instead, the efforts to reform it, I spy one more framed royal photo. There’s the king’s nephew, pants rolled up, enjoying a foot massage from an incarcerated trainee.

Later, we deepen our investigation into the drinking-while-standing phenomenon at Mashika, an Italian izakaya in a hip pocket of Nishi-ku. The Italian-Japanese coalition is hardly new territory in this pasta-loving country, but Mishika is a different kind of mash-up. To start with, the space isn't really a restaurant at all. During the day, grandma sells cigarettes out of the small space. When the sun goes down, grandson fires up the burners as a crowd of thirtysomething Osakans drink Spritz and fill up on charcuterie, sashimi, and funky hybrids like spaghetti sauced with grated daikon and crowned with a wedge of ocean-sweet saury tataki. The menu follows no particular rules at all. Nobody seems to notice.

After his relationship with Kiyo had turned to disappointment and he began coming to town to drink, he got to know a woman who worked in a cheap noodle restaurant. She was from Sango’s village and since she hardly had any land of her own to till, she worked as a day laborer, helping to till others’ fields, and did various other jobs. Hearing about Yoshimine and Kiyo, she’d said that love affairs demand the luxury of free time.

Back then, rice was in short supply, and the government was waging a campaign to encourage people to eat more flour and mixed grains. At school, our lunchboxes were inspected daily, and anyone caught bringing white rice had their palms strapped. Flour, donated as food aid by the United States and stamped on each sack with a picture of a handshake, was distributed by the neighbourhood office and eventually found its way into the marketplace. Lunch in every home consisted of sujebi, knife-cut noodles, or banquet noodles — the extra-thin soup noodles that were extruded by machine and so insubstantial that you’d barely even chewed them before they were slipping down your throat. They were called banquet noodles because we used to eat them only on special days, but they were ubiquitous in our neighbourhood since you could prepare them many different ways, including in soup or tossed in a spicy sauce.

Reka’s Haluski 1 package egg noodles 8 strips thick-cut bacon 1 small green cabbage, sliced 1 medium onion, sliced 4 garlic cloves, minced Salt and freshly ground black pepper Cook the egg noodles according to the package directions in salted boiling water until al dente. Drain and set aside, reserving 1 cup of salty pasta water. Set a large skillet over medium heat. Cook the bacon until crisp, then remove from the skillet and chop into 1/2-inch pieces. Drain off a tablespoon of bacon fat if the skillet is very greasy. Add the cabbage and onion to the skillet, and sauté for 5 minutes. Add the garlic and sauté for another 5 minutes. Once the cabbage is tender, add the cooked egg noodles and bacon to the skillet. Stir well, adding a dash of reserved pasta water to combine the flavors. Season with salt and pepper, and eat on a cold winter day after the holidays, while listening to “Because of You” by Tony Bennett and His Orchestra. “Hey,

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You really can't go wrong with the food at any Jewish holiday. Well, with the exception of Passover, because matzah is terrible and eight days of no carbs but matzah and potatoes can have you crying for pizza by the end. But think bagels and lox to break the Yom Kippur fast. All sorts of exotic fruits on Tu B'Shevat. Brisket and tzimmes and noodle kugel for pretty much any occasion. And that's only the Ashkenazi food; I'd been treated to Sephardic and Mizrahi food occasionally at friends' houses growing up, and I remembered fish cooked in spicy tomato sauce, tangines with chickpeas and saffron, Yemenite braided bread with whole eggs hidden in the twists. But Hanukkah food? Because Hanukkah celebrates the miracle of the oil, it's basically a mitzvah to eat fried foods for the holiday. And doing a good deed by eating French fries or doughnuts is the absolute best way to do a good deed.

The day is brittle as instant noodles I despise.

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Everyone who could cook had cooked: Carrots that tasted like candy. Asparagus coated in a creamy yellow sauce. Potatoes prepared six different ways--- fried, roasted, baked, twice-baked, and cooked with cheese and with cream. Fish flavored with herbs that Terlu couldn't even name but tasted beyond delicious. A few dishes weren't her favorite, like the mussels in butter that Yarrow loved but reminded Terlu too much of slugs, but she loved the dish with squash cut into noodles mixed in a nut-flavored sauce, as well as a sweet carrot bread made by one of the uncles. And Yarrow had prepared her favorite, the layered zucchini, squash, and tomato dish he'd perfected. They ate, they talked, they laughed, they sang, they told stories, and they danced. Above the greenhouse, snow fell lightly as the shortest day of the year dipped toward nightfall. When desserts were brought out, everyone oohed and ahhed. Yarrow's sugar glass with flavored roses was proclaimed the star, but there were also berry pies (Terlu contributed a blueberry pie) and cakes and cobblers and an amazing peach tart (Yarrow's grandfather's recipe). And of course, chocolate-covered oranges.

What would it be like to reflect on his days, rather than trying vainly to forget them?

Reka’s Haluski 1 package egg noodles 8 strips thick-cut bacon 1 small green cabbage, sliced 1 medium onion, sliced 4 garlic cloves, minced Salt and freshly ground black pepper Cook the egg noodles according to the package directions in salted boiling water until al dente. Drain and set aside, reserving 1 cup of salty pasta water. Set a large skillet over medium heat. Cook the bacon until crisp, then remove from the skillet and chop into 1/2-inch pieces. Drain off a tablespoon of bacon fat if the skillet is very greasy. Add the cabbage and onion to the skillet, and sauté for 5 minutes. Add the garlic and sauté for another 5 minutes. Once the cabbage is tender, add the cooked egg noodles and bacon to the skillet. Stir well, adding a dash of reserved pasta water to combine the flavors. Season with salt and pepper, and eat on a cold winter day after the holidays, while listening to “Because of You” by Tony Bennett and His Orchestra.