Rice – freeze dried rice noodles after they’ve been rehydrated

No noodles are actually called "brown noodles" but the only noodles I'm aware of that are brownish in colour are either wheat or buckwheat.

Given the suggestion to cook it with a "protein source", and given that this is meant to be a quick and easy meal, I'm sure that the idea was to cook some dried noodles briefly in soup along with some sliced or shredded meat. This is common in Asian cuisine, and it can be nutritious, assuming you don't rely on instant noodles and artificial flavour packets.

You'd probably be looking at one of the following:

• Ramen, which is traditionally made from la mian (hand-pulled buckwheat noodles, although sometimes they're made from wheat), served in broth, usually with meat and green onions, and often flavoured with soy sauce. Keep in mind that real ramen is actually quite difficult and time-consuming to make, and is not even close to the "instant ramen" you see for 99 cents a package. You can cheat a little and still have a decent meal by buying quality dried noodles and cooking them in real homemade broth, or at least canned broth.

• Udon, AKA "thick noodles" (made from wheat), which are also typically prepared in broth, specifically dashi - broth made from kombu (kelp), dried tuna or bonito flakes, and occasionally mushrooms, and seasoned with soy sauce and mirin (rice wine). Meat isn't as common in udon, but fish and tofu are, especially deep-fried. You can still make it with beef or chicken. You can find decent-quality instant dashi at Asian grocery stores, so again, prep time is minimal if you get the right ingredients.

• Soba (buckwheat) noodle soup, which (in my experience) is almost always served in miso (again, available in instant form). Seasonings and toppings are otherwise similar to udon, although they tend to get a bit more elaborate. For example, the wiki page references tsukimi soba which means poaching a raw egg in the cooked soup.

• Finally Phở, which is the Vietnamese take on this, which uses rice noodles (so definitely not brown). The most common preparation (at least in all of the Vietnamese restaurants around here) is simply the hot soup and noodles with some rare beef dropped in to briefly cook, then topped with basil and bean sprouts just before eating. The broth is really very difficult for non-natives to learn and instant pho is usually terrible, so I wouldn't recommend this for beginners.

Of course you can always just go with good old-fashioned Western chicken noodle soup or chicken soup with rice and vegetables. Chicken noodle soup usually uses egg noodles, which are, again, definitely not brown, so although they're a fine choice, they're almost certainly not what the question is referring to.

An answer to your edited points.

Number 4. Pores don't do much during cooking. It is about cell walls and proteins. A pore is a channel constructed from zillions of cells (like a tunnel constructed from bricks). A cell is like a bubble (the cell wall) filled with liquid (the cell plasma). The cell wall is made from zillions of proteins, like a hat knitted from wool. In freezing, the plasma turns to sharp ice crystals and tears the cell walls apart (like poking holes in a hat).

Then under heat, the proteins unravel the way you could unravel a knitted hat if you tugged at it. If you cook the meat just a little, the proteins remain bushy and soak up liquid. If you overcook it, they stretch and start looking like a long, smooth thread and can't soak up water and/or cell plasma any more. The meat tastes dry and unpleasant.

Freezing the meat is just bursting the cell walls. Unravelling the proteins is denaturation. They are two different things.

Number 1. More water does indeed mean more damage to the cell walls. No denaturation happens there, as explained above. But you can't change the amount of water within the chicken cells in any way while it lives. This amount self-regulates, like blood pressure. If you feed the chicken more water, it will excrete more water, not store it in its cells.

Number 2. You want lots of air around the chicken if you want to get ice crystals buildup on its surface. That's why Sobachatina suggested an inflated bag - to keep air around it. Also, unpacked chicken will make your freezer dirty and contaminate other food with uncooked meat juices, which is dangerous.

Number 3. As far as I know, water ice expands while cooling from 0 to -4°C and then starts shrinking. Most damage is done while the crystals expand, so I suppose that most of the damage will be completed within the first 1-2 days (depending on how long it takes for the complete chicken to cool to -4°C).