Just add water

Momofuku Ando, the inventor of Ramen noodles, died the other day at the age of 96. As Dale McFeatters of the Scripps Howard News Service pointed out, Ando deserves to be remembered by a couple of generations of "starving and impecunious" college students for supplying them with cheap sustenance for those all-nighters.

I was introduced to the delights of late-night noodles by a friend, Craig Thorburn, who also kept a small chile pepper plant in a pot on his dorm room. If memory serves, they were pequin peppers, tiny and fiery hot. We'd pluck a few to stir into the boiled noodles, and on special occasions -- when we were able to steal one from the dorm kitchen -- we'd crack a raw egg into the boiling soup. Num-num.

It all paid off for Ando. His company, which he launched in 1958, sold 46.3 billion of the little cellophane packets last year.