Cooking for One Idea: 10-Minute Angel Hair Pasta Soup

10-Minute Angel Hair Pasta Soup with Pacific Clams and Veg

Cooking for one can be quite a hassle, so I usually have to settle for “fast food” like takeaway, instant noodles or a bowl of museli with milk. It’s not that I hate instant noodles or fast food, I love them. But sometimes I do like the idea of cooking for one. So this is one of my “fast-to-cook-and-good-to-eat” meals when I’m home alone. And it’s almost a non-recipe. Very fast, delicious and you can clear whatever ingredients (such as yong tau foo, frozen dumplings, dried seaweed, meat balls, leftover roast meat) you have in the fridge.  The trick for me is to use angel hair pasta which is to me, like the western version of our local bee hoon (rice vermicelli) with its long thin strands of noodles. They usually cook in 2 minutes, just like instant noodles. My pantry, for this reason, is always well-stocked with angel hair.

Ingredient: Angel Hair

Ingredients
(Serves 1)
- angel hair pasta (Capelli d’angelo) for one person (about 80g for me)
- any ingredients you have in the fridge (I use pacific clams aka bao bei and baby bok chai that day)
- water and salt to cook the pasta
- 300ml home made soup stock (or cheat with plain water and seasoning cube)

Directions
1. Bring a large pot of water with some salt added to a boil. Then add angel hair pasta and cook according to the package instructions (mine is 2 minutes). Drain the pasta and set in a soup bowl.
2. Rinse the pot you cooked the pasta. Then add soup stock (home made or instant) to it. Bring to the boil. Blanch whatever ingredients you have in the soup stock until cooked (for my clams – 30 seconds;veg – 10 seconds) Most ingredients will cook in under 2 minutes.
3. Pour the boiling soup and ingredients over the angel hair pasta. Garnish with sliced spring onions, chilli padi and/or fried shallots.

Cooking Notes
- If you’re using simple greens, you just have to blanch them in the last 10-20 seconds.
- If the ingredient is something which will colour the soup (e.g. cai xin), you can cook it in step 1 instead of 2.

Other Cooking for One Ideas
- Mee Suah Soup
- Cheater’s pita pizza
- 10-minute egg fried rice
- easy steamed fish with rice
- Hong Kong style instant noodles