Where extraordinary becomes eccentric

Because my mother and my brother abandoned me for this weekend and left to visit my grandmother (and labor excessively around her cottage in the mountains), I have to prepare my own meals. Apart from the obvious problems I have to deal with that are related to making food, such as deciding what to make or when to sacrifice your limited time to do the cooking and subsequent cleaning, I found another conundrum I must address.

I am an economical person, especially when it comes to managing my energy (i.e. I am lazy), and thus selected the pre-cooked pasta with some sauce for my lunch. On the back, the package carried initially lucid, but on the second look puzzling, directions. In the second step they said that I should pour the entire content of the package to 0.5 liter of boiling water.

For few moments that rendered me visibly quizzical, because I didn’t know how much of cold water would later turn into 0.5 l of boiling water. Did the food companies take into consideration the basic principles of physics? When I was making a similar meal about a year ago, too much of the water vaporized and made the sauce more solid than liquid. This time I decided to add a little more (I know, not exactly a scientific terminology that would be appropriate in this case; I know I could do the calculations) than 0.5 I and hope the results would be more pleasing.

The outcome looked more like a soup rather than pasta with a cheese sauce. Once again I defeated by cooking.

The question therefore arises: would it be too hard for the food companies to adjust the amounts of potential food in the packages to fit the directions that would deal with exact amounts of cold water? “1) pour 0.5 liter of water into the pot 2) once the water starts boiling, add the content of the package and keep stirring it for 5 minutes” would certainly result into much better food at the end, at least for me.