Miso Spaghetti Soup

You know how it is: It gets to be late in the evening, so you don't want to cook anything that takes ages, don't have much of an appetite anyway, but do feel the need to eat something... And all you have in your cupboards is basically leftovers.

So, what do you do? Dash down to the kebab shop, or go wild and throw something together at random?

OK, probably me too... but if all I ever ate was takeaways, I wouldn't have anything to write about, would I? So let's just assume for a moment that your first instinct is to consider which leftovers can go together, and start planning a quick, scrappy meal with what you have to hand.

Ingredients:

• Spaghetti (or any other dry pasta leftovers you have that aren't quite a full portion)
• 1 Sachet of Miso Soup Paste

Preparation Time: About 15 minutes!

Tools Required:

• Medium-sized Saucepan
• Stirring Implement des choix

The Process:
Very, very simple stuff. This is basically a combination of making miso soup (empty sachet into pan of boiling water, stir) and making spaghetti (add dry spaghetti to pan of boiling water, stir), with the intention of allowing the flavour of the soup to permeate somewhat into the spaghetti, thus removing the need to add salt to the water.

So... Half-fill the saucepan with water, bring it to the boil and add the miso soup paste. Stir it in thoroughly for a few minutes, then simply add the spaghetti, and treat it as if you're making it up for a bolognese, or whatever. Obviously, though, once the spaghetti is ready (10-12 minutes on the boil), you decant the entire contents of the pan into a bowl and serve, rather than straining the spaghetti and tipping the water away.

Neat, huh?

The Results:
There's a problem with this idea which I only now see in retrospect: the starch in the spaghetti. Even as I was eating it and noting that the soup was unusually bland, yet bitter, it didn't occur to me that I'd made a small oversight/error in judgement in my combination of ingredients: Allowing the soup to flavour the pasta is all well and good... but starch from the pasta will inevitably flavour the soup

It wasn't bad, really, but there was a noticable change to the taste of the soup, and I can only think it was the starch that did it. This could probably be remedied by using fresh pasta, as opposed to dry... or noodles rather than spaghetti.

Still, as quick, hot, soupy snacks go, this is one to keep in mind.