Ramen! - Boozing it Up
Fear not, gentle readers, for the cooks of this deliciousness were totally over twenty-one. Besides, the point of this is not to booze up one’s food, but to add the flavour to one’s food, and thus, improve it.
For this, you need very little. Start by boiling some water for beef ramen - the beef bit is very important. Don’t try this with chicken, or any other light meat flavour. (PROTIP: put one cup water in the pot on high heat to start boiling, and one cup in the microwave for two minutes. By the time the water comes out of the microwave and you pour it into the pot, the water is nearly or actually boiling, and you don’t feel like you need to wait as long to make it boil.) Add some two buck chuck of the rouge variety. I’ve got Firefly Ridge Syrah, from the Central Coast, for those of you that care about that sort of thing. The important bits are that it’s red, and Firefly, which amuses me because I really like River and want to be Kaylee.
Add some wine - a splash and some, until the water turns brown - the the water and let it keep boiling for a bit. Add an egg in here if you wish, but I didn’t try it with egg. I feel like it would be weird, eating wine-flavoured egg. Mimosa-flavoured egg, on the other hand, is perfectly acceptable, as is wine-mosa. That’s when you don’t have champagne and just add orange juice to white wine. Perfectly legitimate drink. I didn’t just make it up.
Once the water is boiling well again, add in the noodles and let it cook for about ten minutes. I prefer my noodles super soft and delicious, and those of you that prefer them al dente don’t get booze ramen, which is sad, because it makes beef ramen taste more like beef. It’s amazing and magical that it does this. I don’t understand it, it may just be me and my tastebuds associating beef or steak with red wine, but it works and I feel like I should share this with you.
The ramen ought to cook this long so that the alcohol cooks out of it. You could try lighting it on fire to begin with, without any water in the pot, but I have a tendency to start fires in the kitchen without intending to do so, so I try to avoid fire. It will probably still smell like wine and booze when you ladle it into your bowl, depending on how much booze you put in.
When it’s finished cooking - it should stay a dark brown - turn off the heat, ladle it into your bowl, and stir some raw spinach in. It will wilt just a little bit, and stay super green and delicious and not have the life boiled out of it, nor the vitamins, which I hear are good things. But mostly it is delicious and adds colour and I like my food to be pretty. I like all the things to be pretty!
Next week: Who knows? I still haven’t gone grocery shopping, but never fear, my dears, for I shall definitely be eating ramen again next week. I’m a college student, after all.
