Christmas Dinner Ramen

in praise of the instant noodle

Here’s a bold little thesis statement for you:

leftovers out; instant noodles in.

This is not a popular opinion in the week between Christmas and New Year, obviously, but my God how I hate leftovers. I hate how they hang around in the fridge. I hate how they taste like yesterday. I hate how they accumulate each other’s flavours to become sort of misc; I hate how they reheat; I hate them cold. Leftovers are my worst thing, and I hate roast dinner leftovers most of all. But I also hate to waste things.

This is a bad opinion to have in the days after you have hosted Christmas for seven, when most of those seven have gone home, and now there’s just two of you.

It is a worse opinion to have when both of those two are sick, taking it in rough turns to have a variety of surprising and gruelling symptoms, and nobody is in the mood for a roast beef sandwich.

I don’t actually mind a roast beef sandwich— the acceptable face of leftovers— but I cannot look one in the face this week. Rich and I were both so miserably ill last night that we gave up on bed entirely and brought the duvet and the pillows and the cat down to the sofa¹, and the house was full of pine needles and torn paper and tinsel and candles and calendars and chocolates and chocolate wrappers and hampers and coffee cups and clementine peel and pillows and paper chains and ribbons and half-dead house plants and cards out of crackers and bits off the crackers and half a bone the puppy had as a Christmas present and half a Dolly Parton chewable microphone that the puppy had as a Christmas present and a hundred little pieces of chewed cardboard that the puppy had claimed as a Christmas present. There were blankets everywhere and the sheer weight of it all made it impossible to think. And we had not been slack on the clearing up! But seven people and a puppy and a cat is a lot, and then everyone went back to work or got sick or both.

And so I wanted bright and clean, you know? I still do! I want broth and zest and kick. I want to feel both pure and wholesome, and also to do very little: I don’t want to cook anything elaborate, I don’t even want to make rice because I don’t want to wash it up. I’ve washed up for days.

I want to sit quietly in clean pyjamas, and sip from an elegant Japanese bowl like Nigel Slater.