Happy to be back in the kitchen after a fortnight enjoying good food cooked by others. Getting back into the kitchen always starts with sprucing up the workspace, washing out the vessels and going out to buy fresh ingredients.

It’s fascinating how often I start thinking of a meal after I have a pot or a pan on the fire. Like today I had a deep wok on the flame, filled with water and instinctively added some salt. The only thing I had decided before putting the wok on was that I would make something with noodles.

We are a family of five, and the preferences were for two soupy noodles, two stirfries. So I added a couple of tomatoes (cut into quarters), two chillies (whole) and a handful of garlic cloves and three small capsicums pulled apart by hand instead of cut by knife.

Next into the wok were eight portions of bird’s nest noodles (circular, thin noodles that cook very fast and add their own flavour to the dish). Five minutes later, I used a fork to pull out four portions (advantage of bird’s best noodles), refreshed them under cold water in a colander and added two drops of olive oil. To the wok, I splashed some white brewed vinegar and added four drops of soya sauce. Five minutes later the plated noodle soup was on the table.

In a new pan, I added handful of garlic cloves, and two sliced chillies with olive oil, waited till the garlic was deep golden brown and then added two portions of drained noodles, added salt, stir fried for a minute and on to the plate.

The fourth serving was similar to the chilly garlic noodle except no chilly and addition of soya sauce.

It took 30 minutes in all from deep wok-on-flame to serving all four portions of noodles.