Easy does it

Uncomplicated meals can be filling, nutritious

This story is about real food. Not fancified, froufrou, food-writer food. No scallops of veal or veal of scallops, no soupcons of creme • Recipes | D4

anglaise or artistically arranged swirls of demiglace. All of those are fine, but this story features food you cook after a long day at work and the kids have softball and band practice.

For suggestions, I turned to colleagues about their go-to foods — the food they cook when everyone is hungry and they just

don’t have the time or the energy or maybe even the ingredients to make foie gras terrine.

They responded with delightful, easy-to-make ideas that tasted great. Each one, incidentally, included a starch, a source of protein and vegetables.

Even the most exotic of the responses is simple because it makes use of prepared items you get at the store. Tikka masala naan pizzas begins with premade naan flatbreads, which you then spread with tikka masala sauce that you spoon on straight from the jar.

This dish works so well because that tikka masala sauce from a jar can be awfully good, if you like spicy food.

I added cooked chicken and sauteed mushrooms to the naan pizza (which is to say the non-pizza), topped it with shredded mozzarella cheese and added a few leaves of spinach more for visual appeal than flavor. A few minutes in a hot oven melted the cheese and browned the edges of the naan.

It was an easy-to-make Indo-italian masterpiece.

Sticking to the Italian-ish theme, I next made hahnilini. This is clearly the creation of a woman who has two children: It is fast, efficient and filling. It looks nice, and it tastes good, too.

Hahnilini begins with a pretty form of pasta — bowtie, shell or fusilli (which the recipe’s creator calls “scroodle noodles”). This you boil as usual but a couple of minutes before it will be done, you add some broccoli to let it cook with the pasta.

Genius, right? You drain the pasta-’n’-broccoli and toss it with chunks of cooked chicken, garlic salt, butter and shredded Parmesan cheese.

Next up is instant ramen with a difference. Perfect instant ramen takes your standard packet of ramen — I bought one for 25 cents — adds broccoli, poaches an egg in it and tops it with butter, scallions, sesame seeds and, um, American cheese.

The recipe is actually an adaptation of a recipe by a Los Angeles-based chef that ran in The New York Times. It’s Korean comfort food, said the chef, Roy Choi; it is how he used to eat ramen when he was growing up and still loves to eat it today.

The addition made by my colleague is the broccoli. The broccoli rounds out and deepens the flavor and provides nutrients to an environment that is otherwise as rich in sodium as it is in taste.

And finally, I made a quesadilla that is defined less by specific ingredients than whatever you happen to have left over in the fridge. That’s what happens when you’re pressed for time and you need a go-to dinner.

I wanted this one to be vegetarian. I put in broccoli (I had some left over from the other recipes), plus sauteed mushrooms and diced tomatoes, plus, of course, shredded cheese.

It was good, though. That’s the advantage of a "what’s in the fridge quesadilla." Pretty much anything you use is going to taste fine.