If I don’t have leftovers handy, an “easy cook” meal is my usual lunch. Maybe it’s a nuked potato with some sauteed spinach and tahini sauce. Maybe it’s a salad. Maybe it’s just toast and self-loathing (let’s keep it real). But most of the time, it’s going to be pasta. And the pasta should not, ideally, require more than one pan, that is, the vegetables/sauce should not need to be cooked or they can cook with the pasta. I’m not trying to impress anyone here except my stomach. I save the work for when more than one person is going to enjoy it.

The basic formula here is: Any kind of pasta + a generous handful of any kind of baby greens + sauce mixed in a bowl. Sauce could be faux-cheese based (something soft and spreadable, like Miyoko’s Double Cream Garlic Chive, or a homemade herbed cashew cheese), or just add some fresh herbs (if handy) and hemp seeds to the rest – a vinegar (red wine vinegar is great), some nutritional yeast, and black pepper. If it’s too thick, steal a few tablespoons of the pasta cooking water. Bing-bang-boom.

For this post, I documented my lunch of whole wheat elbow macaroni with arugula and cultured cashew cheese (a play on the recipe from Vegan Eats World). It ain’t fancy, but it hit the spot.