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Noodles!

my latin glands are empty

Everybody loves noodle soup, but it's easy to overcomplicate things. The traditional recipes with "real" ingredients take forever and tend to cost ten bajillion KWD. On the other end of the spectrum, those instant ones sometimes make me feel bloated and ill when I eat them. I don't know if it's the high sodium content or what, but it's frustrating! The cool thing is, though, solidly decent noodle soup is quick and easy to make at home, and you just have to follow a simple rubric and keep a couple pantry ingredients stocked up.

There's more local and regional variations than I am aware of or able to document, but Chinese-style noodle soups and their descendents (stuff like ramen, ramyeon, saimin, birria ramen, etc.) are usually composed of five components:

soup stock (chinese-style stock, dashi, pho broth, homemade stuff, etc.)
seasoning base (sauces, sugar, finely chopped herbs, etc.)
aromatic oil (rendered animal fats, roast meat drippings, sesame oil, garlic oil, etc.)
noodles (literally anything you like or have on hand, as long as it's noodle-ish)
toppings(proteins, pickles, veggies, chopped herbs, ground meat sauces, etc.)

The basic method you're going to follow is:

Make your stock and put whatever additions you want in it.
Put your seasoning base and aromatic oil in a serving bowl. Just let it sit at the bottom.
Boil your noodles.
Mix the soup and maybe some of the noodle-boiling water in the bowl with the seasonings and oil. A little bit of starchy noodle water will improve the texture! It gets a little silky, like when you put a cornstarch slurry in your egg flower soup.
Add your toppings and eat!

Simple Chinese-style Noodle Soup

This is really just a half-assed version of yángchūn miàn, one of the simplest Chinese noodle soups. Suffice to say, I'm not trying to cook something authentic here. It's just a tastier alternative to instant noodles that I usually make for brunch when I have a morning free. When I lived a short train ride from SF Chinatown, I used to love eating cheap soups like this at the hole-in-the-wall spots off the main drag. The prices were so low, somehow. I wonder how many of them are still around, the way the rents are looking now. I figure a lot of them are long gone.

WHAT YOU NEED

60g dried somen (or whatever noodle you like)
250ml Chinese-style chicken stock
a bit of soy sauce, brown sugar, and maybe some dark soy sauce
lard, chicken fat, or toasted sesame oil
toppings(whatever you want)

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HOW-TO

Boil your stock. You can do it in a pot, or just pop a Pyrex in the microwave and mix in some stock powder once it's done. I like to toss in a ginger slice, some chopped green onion stalk, and sometimes a pinch of dried wakame strips. It can be plain stock, though. It's good, either way. In a real pinch, plain old water's fine.
Boil your noodles according to the package instructions, or according to your heart, or whatever. Make sure to save some of the water (unless you're doing the baking soda trick to turn Italian pasta into alkaline noodles, in which case you need to get rid of that shit).
Put your seasonings and oil in your serving bowl. My go-to is a dash of soy sauce, a smaller dash of dark soy sauce, a pinch of brown sugar, some chopped green onion greens, and a solid teaspoon or so of toasted sesame oil.
Pour a bit of the stock in the bowl and mix it up, then add the noodles. Pour the rest of the stock and a spoonful of the noodle water on top.
If you want to be fancy, lift the noodles with a chopstick and lay them down again so they sit nicely in the bowl. Super instagrammable; put it on your dating profile
Add your toppings. I've got some fried spam slices and some green onions in my photo.

TIPS AND TRICKS

To save time and money, I like to use somen noodles. It literally takes 1 minute to boil them, and the Tomoshiraga brand is readily available at a reasonable price in many American grocery stores. Asian markets will have bigger packages with better deals, if you have one near you. Depending on where you are located, you might be able to find Korean somyeon or Chinese noodles marketed as "dragon beard" or "dragon whisker." If you can't get any of these or you don't like them, just use something else.
I'm also a big fan of chicken powder. I'll boil simple stocks at home when I have time, but the chicken powder makes everything quick and easy. It's usually like 15 USD for 2 pounds of the Lee Kum Kee brand stuff, and it lasts forever. You can make noodle soup with Western storebought stocks, too, but it won't taste quite right. They're definitely an option, though. There's lots of room to experiment.