NOTHING,

and they get hot, fresh food delivered to them several

times a day. Of course, they do have to be content with
eating, say, fried chicken and nothing else for a month as I
test a recipe, but, all in all, they’ve pretty much got it made.
So you can imagine my surprise one day when I walked
into the kitchen and saw my wife cooking, and my even
greater surprise when I realized she was cooking pasta—in
our smallest pot, and at a simmer. The water barely covered
the noodles as she stirred them to keep them submerged.
“You can’t do that!” I exclaimed in horror. “Obviously,
my diminutive wife, you haven’t cooked a lot of pasta in
your time. Unless you use a giant pot of water at a rolling
boil, your pasta will stick together. The starch will become
too concentrated. It will cook unevenly. It will become
mushy. It will be nine different sorts of horrible, each one
worse than the one before. It is scientific fact that you will
end up with an inedible starchy, sticky blob.”
“Is that so?” was all she said as she turned back to the
pot. Needless to say, my wife was right: the pasta was fine
(though I declined to eat any more than a single tester piece,
citing potential paradoxes in the space-time continuum as
my reason). Indeed, she has precedence for her method.