Tadka Pasta

When my mother came home from school as a kid in Bombay, her mother used to make her a super-quick pasta of noodles tossed in a fragrant tadka for flavor. A few decades later in Atlanta, my grandmother made a version of it as an after-school snack for me, too, but here, she sometimes used instant noodles and I sometimes added a few healthy shakes of Parmesan. Now, a couple decades after that, I’ve added some vegetables—and rarely skip the parm—for a dish that comes together so fast that I can make it and eat it in a 30-minute break between meetings. —Sonia Chopra