Ramen! - Creamy Chicken Noodle Soup
Because ramen deserves that extra exclamation point.
Ramen. The bane and staple of every college student in existence. So cheap, so salty, so bad for you. But so delicious. Of course, this is before you’ve had it day in and day out for the past two weeks. As awesome as the 55 meal plan may be, it has its downsides – namely, not everyone loves the Owl’s Nest fries or cheap safeway food.
But fear not! This intrepid reporter is here to share her love of ramen with you – and how you, too, can once again love ramen. After all, it’s super cheap (pennies for each package, which constitutes an entire meal) and easily available. Hell, it’s even vegetarian if you don’t put the flavor packets in.
This week, we’ll see how leftovers can be reused over and over for more deliciousness.
Creamy Chicken Noodle Soup
(sorry, not vegetarian-friendly)
This last year, I acquired a crock pot in perfect, unused condition. It was beautiful – now I could cook things while I was out and about, attending class, clubs, and generally being awesome. I could even start dinner as I was eating breakfast, because I’m that kind of responsible adult. The only problem was that I cooked two meals (I split with my roommate two chicken breasts with carrots, mushrooms, and a can of corn) plus a little extra, because we’re both tiny girls who eat like birds. So essentially I had cooked three and a half meals. Leftovers graced my fridge for a week before I finished it all off.
However, the great thing about crock pots is that you can (sort of) use them as a storage container, too, which means fewer dishes to wash, which is always a plus in my book. Some of the chicken, tender, soft, and easily pulled apart, could become a sandwich, eat some as soup, eat it over rice for a slightly dryer meal.
The bit that made its way into ramen, used up the last of the leftovers, and made my ramen extra delicious, was the leftover broth and vegetables, about one cup. Pour that into the ramen pot, boil with another cup of water plus a bit extra to account for the salt that’s going to boil down into a seawateresque liquid, and shazam! The vegetables make the ramen somewhat healthier, the broth gives it a more chicken-y taste. Crack an egg in there and you’ve got protein, vegetables, carbs, some fat – a balanced meal.
Of course, I like playing around in the kitchen (sometimes to disastrous ends, just ask my little brothers), so I had to go rooting around the cupboards to see what else I could add in. I always keep dry milk on hand because I absolutely detest the taste of milk but need to keep my calcium levels at maximum intake. Being female and part Asian, childbirth and osteoporosis are quite probably in my future. Just add a few heaping spoonfuls of dry milk to any baking recipe, and you’ve upped the calcium levels. I also hate buying milk – it always goes bad before I manage to use it up, since I rarely bake. Just ask my oven and all its burn marks why. So keep dry milk on hand and you can add it to plain water as a milk substitute. You can’t taste the difference in baking, though I wouldn’t recommend it for your cereal. Granted, I never recommend milk with your cereal, but the point stands.
So I added a bunch of dry milk (it must have been quite a bit, since the soup turned out quite creamy). Keep stirring it in so it doesn’t clump, and it’s delicious. Just because you have Asian-style noodles doesn’t mean you can’t make it European style deliciousness. Then, being the unhealthy person that I am, guzzler of butter and drinker of olive oil (in my defense, I had been doing a lot of exercise and not consuming enough calories), I had to add in butter. I think I added in a quarter stick of butter in roughly ½ centimeter rectangular prisms (they aren’t cubes, I hate when people call obviously non-cubular things cubes), so it all melted in fairly well. I even fed it to someone else and they enjoyed it.
The only problem with the dry milk was that I added it too quickly and didn’t stir enough, so the soup ended up slightly grainy. There was a definite texture to the creamy broth, but I’m sure that if someone more patient than I stirred in the soup much more slowly and started at the time the egg was cracked in, the soup would be much smoother. Or you could just use straight up milk, but that would require actually buying milk. I’m not going to be spending money on something I shan’t eat, because I’m cheap. I am, after all, extolling the virtues of ramen.
Next week: I shall attempt to justify buying expensive local, fresh, possibly even organic vegetables. Organic is a maybe – I may be from Kresge, but I’m not that much of a hippie, and the real definition of ‘organic’ just means something carbon based. Trying to be a better, healthier person doesn’t mean being a stupider person willing to throw money everywhere.
