Not too long ago I found this picture in my phone.
It is a good one.
It is the kind of picture I look at whenever I want to feel warm and fuzzy and comfortable and cozy.
It is also the kind of picture that, thankfully or not so thankfully, I don't seem to have very much anymore.
Gone are the days where I could have instant noodles up to three times a week.
Gone too are the days when I didn't have any freedom with the kind of seasoning I wanted and had to eat whatever was decided for me.
Instant noodles have always been a part of my life.
And as so there're memories both good and not so good associated with it.
I wish I could say that instant noodles have always, consistently been a food that brought me comfort, but life's not always so, yes?
Especially when there are times when I wish the noodles were not seen as a flippant choice of meal when choices there could have been much better.
Thankfully some of my pleasantest memories have occurred in recent years, like this bowl of Myojo Seafood that I cooked, and ate, either around Christmas, or was it my birthday, at home, because I wanted to have something special to me, something exclusively mine.
Funny thing about this bowl of noodles, however, is that I didn't feel like using the pot even though on hindsight I really should have.
I have, after all, a pot that's designed especially for such a purpose, to just put water in, put the noodles in, close the lid and let it cook.
But for some reason, whenever I want to cook these noodles I'm too bum to even take out the pot and just pour hot water straight into the bowl.
Really, I shouldn't do that.
What I should do is to get a packet of noodles whose seasoning I really like, like Nissin's Tonkotsu ramen, or Myojo's Seafood, or Koka's Laksa (if they still be around), cook my noodles inside this Little Blue Pot, and steam a tray of siew mais on the top both at the same time.
Yes, that's what I should do.
It would, otherwise, be no different from the time when these noodles were seen as nothing more than a means to an end, when choice of seasoning didn't matter (you took the ikan bilis cube and nothing else) and it became a go-to meal when you wanted to excessively save money.
I will not forget the time when two people stood for 45 minutes in a supermarket and tried to make up their minds about Noodle Flavor 1 or 2 for what was a 10sen difference (SGD$0.05), and after that, whilst not having the means to prepare the noodles well, had it done in a half-cooked style that made the noodles neither warm and appetizing, nor the hot dog pleasant on the tongue.
Especially since there were other just as good food alternatives nearby.
There are very few instances where the memory of noodles gets particularly bad.
The half-cooked attempt is one of them.
But there's still another one.
I didn't have a problem with the noodles of this one.
I had a problem with the other ingredients.
Chicken feet are not, and never have been my thing, and I don't care if they be fried, stewed, steamed or boiled.
Watching a relative fish out noodles from a rice cooker (up in the Blue Mountains) with all them chicken feet swimming about in the soup below is to me a memory as unnerving as the day I first saw it all those years ago.
There was a chicken foot in my bowl.
I couldn't eat it.
I'm not sure if I enjoyed those noodles very much either, tasteless as they were.
I'm not the kind to eat noodles without any sort of flavor.
And even it be those days when I'm not into the seasoning, there's always the magic of butter, sesame oil and mixed herbs that sufficient flavor which doesn't overwhelm.