Late Night Snacks
Year-end edition
In keeping with the end of a truly horrible year, I’ve committed to spending the next few weeks reveling in small discoveries of joy.
I don’t know when I became snacky, but it was late in life: when I was a child, mealtimes were structured, eating ran on a schedule, the only exception being an iced popsicle you could get for ten cents from the mamak shop while waiting for a bus home after school. Perhaps it was when I first moved into the undergraduate dorms on campus, or when I started doing part-time work and getting a bit of spending power, but one way or the other, I became quite addicted to a certain style of late-night instant ramen in my early twenties that still serves me well today.
The recipe is simple enough. You take a packet of plain ramen noodles (Nissin Sesame Oil being my favorite), boil them once to cleanse the noodles of impurities, and again to make the soup. While on the second boil, crack an egg in, add a slice of cheap Kraft cheese. Stir, to keep the cheese and egg from sticking to the side of the pot. Pour it out into a bowl, finish off with another slice of Kraft cheese. The heat from the noodles melts the cheese as you eat, resulting in a satisfyingly sticky texture.
It’s a supper food; even having it for dinner is pushing it a little. Part of the noodle’s allure is how it’s best enjoyed under the cover of midnight, slurped slowly while pouring over study notes, or warming your tummy after a night of dancing. It’s a secretive delight when enjoyed alone, a fuzzy glow when made for another. I remember coming back to my dorm room one night, exhausted from a day on my feet running logistics for an upcoming school event, and flopping on the vinyl floor, unable to move. My roommate, who’d been working on her assignments, left the room without a word, and returned ten minutes later with a piping hot bowl of ramen. A bowl full of love! Another time, I woke up to my girlfriend pounding on my door, telling me that she’d found my partner patiently stirring a pot of noodles at 3AM in the common kitchen. She wanted to know why he wasn’t asleep; he said that he’d heard I was on the way back to campus and knew that I was consistently ravenous for ramen after drinking and dancing. She looked me in the eye and said, you have to marry this guy, marry him now.
There are other things I’ve snacked on over the years; in my undergraduate days it was mainly the noodles and often, McDonald’s - it was a common practice to reward ourselves with McDelivery Breakfasts after tonning* during hell weeks. When I started working, I turned to things like peanut butter cookies, pretzel sticks, hard-boiled eggs with kewpie mayo, sweet pears, frozen banana bread. At some point it became a matter of health — after twenty-four we were advised to go for full body checkups every couple of years, where we’d have to run on a treadmill while hooked up to wires, only to be lectured by an overworked doctor later about our blood-sugar levels. We were no longer too young and death was no longer too far away; for some of us, it had come knocking close to home. Slowly, the habit of late-night snacking fell away, and we tried to convince ourselves that we enjoyed cold celery sticks and kept them at home for that reason, gnawing on them whenever the munchies arrived. In fact, late nights themselves became frowned upon, they wreaked havoc on our body’s reparative abilities, became harbingers of regret for the morning when the realities of work dawned. We folded ourselves into shapes of stability, smiled at each other, assumed that the shedding of small irresponsibilities was inevitable in life’s forward movement. And it was fine.
The pandemic upturned everything, and that, too. I was no longer working by then, I had returned to school and was pursuing an MFA across time zones. But my working friends, who had all worn the label of adulting so proudly, found themselves locked at home with the restlessness of youth. As long as work got done, who cared what time you slept: suddenly, my friends were binging animes at two in the morning, whispering and giggling on prolonged group calls, kneading and folding dough for the next day’s big baking experiment. They were depressed, too, their days intercut with listless periods of confinement, fatigued from consecutive hours on Zoom. But once night fell, spirits surged, and things took on a sheen of possibility.
It was a night when I was feeling particularly sorry for myself, perhaps a month or two after my unceremonious return from New York. I was up in the middle of the night, I had no choice, my body operated on a time zone completely flipped from its geographical reality. The cumulative effect was that I was both exhausted and mercurial, often bursting into tears at the slightest thing, or losing my temper at the wall. I was convinced that my unreasonable behavior was driving my friends away, yet, mired in that state of anxiety, I could not force myself to behave otherwise.
That night, my girlfriend, sensing that words of comfort could only do so much, sent me a tracking link. It was for a grocery delivery. They say the contents of your fridge are intimate to you and yours, and when it arrived, I saw that it was a map of my late-night snacking habits from over the years. Frozen nuggets, packets of milk, pretzel sticks, dry ramen, soup ramen in my favorite Nissin Sesame Oil flavor, a dozen eggs, and - I was smiling widely now - to finish everything off, slices of cheap Kraft cheese.
*colloquial Singaporean speak for an overnight cram study session.
