There are days -- you may be living them now -- when even the dollar menu feels like a stretch and your cupboards are boring or just plain bare. You're not starving, but you are hungry. You are not destitute, but you are broke.

Somewhere in the dark corners of your pantry lies the answer: 16 cents' worth of cellophane, dried noodles and chicken-flavored salt, enough calories to limp through an afternoon.

Instant ramen.

It is comfort food in the ultimate sense of the word: the comfort that you can eat, and feel as if you've eaten, for mere pennies.

One does not hanker for instant ramen. One doesn't dive into the cupboard in search of ramen and emerge with, say, tomato soup. It is almost always the other way around.

Yet this meal of last resort is all the more satisfying, because the alternative -- hunger -- is unthinkable.

Years from now, when food is memory, mashed potatoes will conjure up your grandmother and Froot Loops your childhood. But nothing will say hard times like instant ramen.