The menu of a harried student

A lot of my friends excuse poor food by saying that they're stressed - with exams around the corner, the argument goes, there's just no time to bother with cooking. So they end up at one disastrous fast food joint or another - and in Cambridge, that usually means some kind of locally run eatery without even the guarantee of uniform mediocrity that a Mcdonald's provides. Not for this area the kind of fresh food focused burger eatery that the New York Times recently described in Oregon, complete with made to order seasonal blackberry shakes.

To some extent, I sympathize with my friends' reluctance to insist on good food right now. Exam time is not the best moment to make the Bouillabaisse below, for example. I certainly have never felt any compulsion to make something like croissants a few days before a test, and even a relatively simple but necessarily time consuming dish like risotto isn't first on my list of meals when I'm really pressed for time.

But none of that means that I stop preparing and eating good food. Indeed, there's an entire range of food that fits exactly the niche that exam time requires. None of these "recipes", and I hesitate to call them that due to their simplicity, requires much time, and usually I've tried to keep even the number of dishes, pots, and pans to a minimum as well. Indeed, I fear that if I didn't eat like this, I wouldn't be able to handle the other things in my life, even if the second semester of the second year at law school is hardly the test the first year was.

Potatoes, for example, are ready made for stressful occasions. Not only does their floury heartiness inherently make them a comfort food, but they lend themselves to a variety of simple dishes, and rarely require much hassle. Of course, one can bake potatoes, if you happen to be studying at home. All that really requires is a few shreds of quality farmhouse cheddar dropped lightly into the punctured tuber, and perhaps a few grindings of pepper - though if you have a little more time it's always good to scoop out the fluffy insides, mix them with smoked mackerel, dijon mustard, and cream before stuffing the mixture back into the potato and leaving it under a broiler with cheese for a minute or two. If you don't have time to let a potato roast for an hour, though, that doesn't mean the potato is off limits - as odd as it sounds, I've been known to take cold new potatoes to school with a sprig of thyme or two, and dip the peeled and boiled portions into an elegant pot of creme fraiche or refreshing yogurt. With a little more time, furthermore, you can always make a potato salad - either in the french style with lemon, vinegar, and chives, or like the Germans do across the border with mayonnaise, mustard, and pickles. Both make great lunches, or good accompaniments to grilled fish at dinner.

Of course, pasta is a friend of the harried student as well. One hardly needs my advice to buy a jar of pesto and mix the cold sauce into newly boiled ribbons of wide pasta. But I think store bought pesto is too salty, and the home variety too complicated, too finicky while such arcanities as the 1933 Exchange Act occupy significant and unwelcome portions of my mind. During times like these, then, I'm much more likely to throw together a sugo crudo : that is to say, just a sort of raw salad of still hot pasta mixed into a bowl of olive oil, fresh, uncooked tomatoes, olives, basil, and anything else you can think of, along with generous shavings of Parmesan or Pecorino Romano. For a bit of variety, you can even substitute a ball of fresh mozzarella and a little proscuitto for the hard grated cheeses, which makes for just as delightful a meal. And if you're happy using the same pot to boil the pasta as for making the sauce, I've found that a simple dressing of olive oil and hot chili flakes, with or without anchovy fillets melted nuttily into the mix, is a real pleasure, especially with two handfuls of hastily chopped or torn flat leaf italian parsley throw into the bowl at the last minute.

If even these preparations take too much time, however, don't feel as if you're left nothing but greasy takeout pizza to eat. As bad as the cheese situation is in the US these days, Trader Joe's has managed to bring in relatively cheap and authentic Roquefort - the greatest of the french hard cheeses, and a worthy competitor to brie and camembert. With a box of scottish style oatcakes at your side, and a healthy bunch of green seedless grapes, a generous slab of the salty, powerful cheese makes a terrific dinner and takes all of twenty seconds to unwrap the cheese and wash the fruit. It's made even better if you remember to leave the cheese out all day to come to the proper temperature. Cold Roquefort is like warm lager: an utter waste of time, and a worse sacrifice of needed calories. Stress also brings other high quality ready made meals to the fore, like smoked salmon, also at home on oatcakes, or as a sort of flat salad with capers and cornichons, or tossed over some more pasta with cream. Alternatively, it's true that the considerably and unalterably gluttonous side of me that's in love with the fruits of the worthy pig has had luck recently with the better italian hams and salamis, tomatoes, and fresh cheese like ricotta or mozzarella. Any of those things served with a decent end of bread would shame few people's tables.

Finally, one can't ever forget meats and fish as the paradigmatic quick foods - what could be better than a piece of fresh tuna seared for no more than a minute on each side, still ruby red beneath a crunchy charred exterior, served with a few spears of quickly broiled asparagus annointed with tart vinaigrette? And I've got a personal soft spot for steak au poivre- made simply by rubbing a good steak into crushed rather than ground peppercorns (ground pepper burns in the pan's heat), and then quickly sauteed to be placed along a salad of frisee and lemon, perhaps followed at some length by my restorative banana bread - made by mashing three ripe fruits with between 1/2 cup and a full cup of sugar, two egg whites, a quarter cup of melted butter or oil, vanilla, and enough self rising four to get a thickish batter - it's better if you then slowly cook it in a relatively cool oven for about an hour, though it can always be baked more aggressively as well.

In other words, stress shouldn't push you towards the fast food restaurant, though an occasional stop there doesn't hurt. It certainly shouldn't suggest raiding the frozen food bins at the supermarket, where one is served as much artifice as aliment. Rather, take some of the suggestions above, and put your own twist on them; studying hard into the night, the virtuous quality of good food ought to sustain you longer than any unnatural substitute, and give you a little more wisdom than you might otherwise have - and if it does neither, at least you'll have eaten well. Life is made up of small victories.