Kresge Writers' House Presents...

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.

Ramen! - Stir Monday

Apologies to everyone that thought Stir Friday would be better, I was too tired and craving Owl’s Nest too much on Friday to make stir fry.  (Ask me again at the end of the year how I feel about Owl’s Nest; I live fifty feet away from it and eat there nearly every day.)

So soup was starting to get boring, and it just didn’t feel like a soupy kind of day.  It was too bright and happy and joyful, and after first rain and a slight chill I was done with soup.  Fried noodles were in order!

My mother used to make these for us all the time, and somehow hers always ended up a little more al dente and a lot less slightly burnt, but I gave it a go and I thought it quite pretty.  Then again, I have a tendency to think all my food, especially food that I’ve made, is pretty, so I might not be the most reliable source.

PICTURES OF FOOD ARE SO PRETTY.

Fun fact: there are more fruits than vegetables in this picture.  Onions, spinach, ground ginger, and carrots are all vegetables, but squash, sweet peppers, tomatoes, and beans are all fruits.  Think about it: beans are seedpods.  Fruits are the seed-bearing parts of a plant.  Ergo, dried beans are dried fruit.  Mind = blown.

So I boiled the ramen in 1 cup of water with the flavour packet.  The directions say boil in two cups, but that’s for soup broth and I was being awesome and making my own recipe (sort of).  In another pan, set to high heat, pour some olive oil and sauté the onions, then because you’re lazy like me take a vegetable peeler to the carrot instead of actually cutting it.  At this point you should let it all cook awhile to soften up and caramelize the onions.

Note that this is being cooked Chinese style, in which everything is cooked in the same pan and absorbs the flavours of everything else, instead of Korean style, where you cook things separately so each spoonful is a riot of flavours.  My mother would probably have a heart attack, but I was hungry and lazy so everything tastes like everything else and it was actually pretty good.

Me being me, I was impatient and cooked things in the wrong order.  I also didn’t chop everything beforehand, which was a bit of an issue with the beans, because they require de-stemming and de-ending before they can be chopped into stir-fry-sized pieces.  So after the onions came the sweet peppers, then squash (yellow and a green variety of summer squash), then the carrots, then some more oil, then ginger, then tomatoes, then the beans, then a third of a glass of water to boil the vegetables / fruits, which was then poured out when I got impatient and realized I was making stir mush instead of stir fry.

It may be slightly mushy, but damn if it isn’t pretty.  The lone spinach leaf was an accident, it missed the wilting train and is wilting on top of everything else.

At the same time, the noodles, which I was TOTALLY keeping an eye on, starting to boil down all their water and stick to the bottom of the pan.  Scrape the noodles from the bottom of the pan, add a bit more water (or just keep an eye on it and when there’s still a bit of water left) and put the spinach leaves on top.  Do not stir them in, just let them sit there in the warm pot on top of the warm noodles and they will steam / wilt to a perfect green colour that’s also soft enough to stir into your finished yumminess.

When your plant bits have cooked to your satisfaction, add ginger, salt, and pepper to taste (remember you don’t need much salt at all, since there’s already so much in ramen).  Mix the noodles and spinach into the planty goodness so that there’s an even distribution of noodles in plant bits, gloat, and serve.  Try not to get locked out of your room and run barefoot to the housing office, it’s never any fun, even when there’s stir fry waiting for you at the end of your terrible cold run.

Next week: Booze and ramen?  Trust me, it works.  Though you should be over 21 if you’re doing this.

Ramen! - Buying Local (Organic) Fun Stuff

Hey look, I figured out pictures!

So last week was a non-vegetarian friendly delight; this week will appeal to ovo-lactarians and hippies.  As many of you have likely seen, on Tuesdays and Fridays there is a market stall at the base of campus (corner of Bay and High).  They sell produce grown on campus at the farm, all organic (which is pretty cool I guess), but more importantly, local and fresh.  If you don’t mind spending a few extra bucks (and I mean, seriously, you’ve already bought ramen, you can splurge a bit) you can get freshly picked fruits and vegetables, as well as flowers (I wish some people would take a hint).  Buying local is also good for the environment because it decreases the amount of fuel necessary to transport the produce, and there’s just something wrong about being able to eat strawberries in wintertime.  When you eat things that are in season, you get better quality, which means sweeter, riper, more flavorful.

This was last Friday’s offerings.  Tuesday had a different selection, with an absolute rainbow of chard and more squash, but fewer tomatoes and corn stalks instead of fig branches.

With all this in mind, as well as the fact that I have no classes Tuesdays and Fridays and get extremely bored, I took a trip to the base with a bit of cash on me.  (I’m not sure that they take cards or checks, I’d play it safe and bring cash, or you’ll miss out on stuff.  I didn’t get any raspberries Friday, which are delicious, and there was only one basket of tiny golden tomatoes, which I also missed out on, despite arriving almost at opening.)

Everything there looked amazing and beautiful; it was an overcast day and the vegetables were extremely bright.

Squash!  There’s some more variety now that it’s most definitely squash season.

The beans were particularly good, and there was more rainbow chard to be had Tuesday.

The only warning to someone going to the market stall: bring your own bags.  They have compostable plastic bags available, but they cost 25¢ apiece and don’t hold up to water well.  Besides, it’s just more adorably fun to go with a basket, anyways.

I was surprised at how little things cost.  I got two small varieties of squash, some spinach, green beans, and baby potatoes for only $2.40 (including the price of three bags).  Since they sell fennel, as well, I was inspired to collect it myself.  It’s easily identifiable and grows on campus, as does wild mustard.  I picked some fennel leaves and a palmful of mustard blossoms (they’re very bitter).  Unless you know what you are doing and have verified from at least three different sources that the plants you are picking are what you think you are picking, do not do this.  Poisonous plants can mimic edible ones, and some (like stinging nettle) are not something to be picked on a whim.  If you have a working knowledge of Californian edible plants, go for it, but above all stay safe.  And avoid mushrooms.  Sometimes you get edible ones, sometimes you get poisonous ones, and sometimes you get hallucinogenic ones.  Guess which ones you’re most likely to end up with.  Go on, guess.  Yeah, that’s right, not the ones that will let you meet purple elephants the size of mice.

For this week’s actual ramen cookery, I chopped all the vegetables and put them in a cup of water with a ton of ice to cover them, ginger’d it (ginger is a verb), and left it out on the cool stove and went to visit friends for a few hours.  Then I had to deal with the issue of fishing out mostly melted ice cubes before I started the water boiling, but whatever.

Everything was chopped into roughly 1.5 centimeter cubes.  Fun fact:  many of my friends don’t let me use knives, even when cooking.  I feel like a responsible, non-murderous adult cutting things for food.

As soon as the water started bubbling, I cracked an egg in there, then boiled the noodles with everything but the spinach, mustard blossoms, and fennel for a few minutes.  The salt, for once, was mostly unnoticeable, all the vegetables diluting it to the amount I prefer.  You, salt addict fiend, might want to add some salt, but I like as little as possible.  At the last minute things were boiling I added in fennel and mustard blossoms, so they would flavor the broth some more, then seconds before turning off the heat added the spinach.  This worked out nicely; the spinach blanched and stayed flavourful and bright.  Most white people insist on boiling the life out of vegetables, and Koreans douse spinach in sesame oil, but just blanched in soup even I, self-avowed hater of non-oil doused spinach, loved it.

Look how pretty the soup was!

The yellow squash and mustard blossoms, both added for colour, had a definite bitter taste, but since there wasn’t much of it it balanced well with the milder taste of beans, green squash, potatoes, and spinach.  The fennel had a sharper taste, clearly fennel, since it was fresh.  It was slightly strange eating potatoes clearly native to the Americas in a distinctly Asian food, but it worked well.  I was surprised that my usual manner of cooking (chop it up to the same rough size and chuck it in a pot to boil) didn’t result in terrible, as my baby brothers can attest to happening many a time, or burnt soup, as my housemates can tell you has happened before.  Don’t ask how I burned soup, I really don’t know, just know that it is possible to make this mistake.  Repeatedly.

So soup!  Pretty, delicious soup!  Again, the ingredients were two kinds of squash, yellow and a pale green striped variety, green beans, spinach, potatoes, fennel, and mustard blossoms, no more than a handful of anything, and an egg and some ginger for flavour.  I was so proud of myself, I kept showing all my housemates over and over how pretty it was.  Poor dears, they kept looking and only stopped acknowledging its beauty on the fifth time or so.

Next week: stir fry, possibly even vegan, incorporating tofu and vegetables from the market stall.  Stay tuned for more ramen ideas and potential craziness!