Super Fast

If you think that this Pork Ramen Soup is easy - and it is - then you’ll be sort of aghast at how lazy I’ve been with my diet recently that I couldn’t even get my act together to make a bowl of ramen until I had to.

Really, thank goodness this site doesn’t have some kind of high-tech automatic feed running from my hypothetical food journal to these pages, because then you’d be reading daily about curly fries and pepperoni pizza - and we’re talking, tragically, about mediocre pepperoni pizza, not even superlative pepperoni pizza where the edges of each pepperoni slice perk up and caramelize as they crisp into little containers of oil.

I’m taking a break from complicated, multi-part dinners. I’m giving real, honest-to-goodness simplicity a try, if only in the name of cutting down on my pepperoni ingestion. The other night I made the easiest-ever lentil soup (recipe coming soon, naturally, if you need one. I love lentil soup), and I felt like a champ.

So when Kristin emailed me about taking part in Real Simple’s blog relay, aka a month of simple dinners cooked by bloggers around the ‘net, I was easily convinced. I claimed a dinner that appeals to be beyond remedial: ramen, the stuff of dorm dinners across the U.S. But this recipe redeems those packages of crackly, curled noodles and transforms them into something you’d not only feed yourself but even offer to people you care about. I can’t say the same about mediocre pepperoni pizza.

You can see all of the simple recipes in the blog relay here, and scroll down for my take on this awesome Pork Ramen Soup.

Don’t look now, but my last two recipes reveal a nostalgic bent. A month out from the wedding, I’m pining for childhood, from moping through violin lessons to squabbling with my sister. That’s not weird, right?

Today, I’m adding another post to this I-want-to-be-a-kid archive: Alphabet Soup.

I made this most childish of soups for the most mature of reasons, so that Alex and I would be able to feed ourselves nourishing meals even when we’ve got no time to cook. Busy evenings have become the norm, which fits right into your lifestyles, based on your responses to the Hello Fresh giveaway post. I wanted to share my own effort to cook a meal really quickly on the blog, too. Just so you know it’s not all no-knead bread and three-layer brownies around here.

To that end, I’m starting a series called Super Fast, which will be full of recipes that require little prepwork, minimal clean-up, and rapid satisfaction. (You can also navigate to the Recipe Index and browse posts under “For When You’re Low On: Time.”)

One of the easiest ways to save on time is to make a dish all in one pot. The chances that you’ll mess something up are minimal. The number of dishes to clean is…one. And as the soup simmers away for 10 minutes at the end, it leaves you with enough pause to wash your breakfast dishes, get out your mugs, take out some cheese and crackers to dip in the soup, and spell out

B-O-N A-P-P-E-T-I-T

with your pasta alphabet.