Whats in Your Ramen?
Posted on Sep 24 in cooking, Food Porn, ingredient, product, recipeby NikaPrint
First, I would LOVE to hear from you all how you personalize your ramen!
What IS in your ramen?
Are you Ramen-Orthodox who likes it plain?
Are you a Ramen-Liberal who likes to make it different every time?
I am not ashamed to say that there are times when the family just wants a certain sort of food and no “healthy” alternative will do. For some families this might be mac & cheese or frozen pizza or twinkies, for us its ramen noodles.
Ramen noodles are ok, if its an occasional treat. (ok, I have a hard time eating them because I had WAY too much of them in college and grad school)
My problem with ramen noodles is that I get bored with it, easily. Until this iteration, I had only experimented with ramens insofar as adding a beaten egg to the noodles after boiling and seasoning to add some protein. This has never appealed to my family so its not been made much.
With the family members crying out for ramen and my being crazy-bored with the unfortunate limp things, I decided to branch out a bit and have the ramen travel to a new and, hopefully, exciting land.
What I came up with was an odd combination of artisanal sustainably-grown ground beef raised on the Golden Acres ranch in Waterloo, New York, homegrown organic tomatoes, organic green onions, and organic oregano, MSG-loaded Del Taco taco seasoning, MSG-loaded ramen noodle flavoring and MSG-loaded ramen noodles. If I make this again, I might need to either simply use carbon monoxide treated ground beef and pesticide and MSG treated veggies from the grocery store or organic MSG-free ramen and my own mix of organic taco seasonings so that there is not such a karmic clash!
This recipe is not earth shattering, its obvious! I just thought I would put it together like this to make it easy.
Mexi-Cali Ramen served in mini-pumpkin bowls
Ingredients:
- 1 pound ground beef
- 1 packet Taco Seasoning
- 1 tomato, cubed
- 3 green onions, confetti dice
- sprig of fresh oregano
- 5 packets ramen noodles, chicken flavor (more or less, up to you)
- 1 pat butter per noodle batch
- 5 mini pumpkins
Directions:
Brown the beef and then prepare as per the taco seasonings packet, adding in the fresh tomatoes, 1/4 teaspoon chopped fresh oregano, and the white part of the diced green onions (save the green part for garnish).
Prepare the ramen noodles such that you remove the noodles from the boil-water, drain, add a bit of butter and a sprinkle of the MSG flavoring packet. Toss in a bit of the green onion dice and more chopped fresh oregano too.
Hollow out the mini pumpkins.
Put ramen noodles in the pumpkin bowl. Spoon some of the taco meat on top. Garnish with diced green onion and a bit of fresh oregano.
Related Posts:
Technorati Tags: personalize, ramen, Orthodox, plain, Liberal, twinkies, ramen noodles, college, grad school, egg, protein, artisanal, sustainably, ground beef, homegrown, organic, tomato, green onion, oregano, MSG, taco, seasoning, carbon monoxide, pesticide, karmic, Mexi-Cali Ramen served in mini-pumpkin bowls, butter, pumpkin, onion
Popularity: 11% [?]
18 Comments
Trackbacks / Pingbacks
-
[...] Whats in Your Ramen [...]
-
Whole Wheat Bread V. White Bread – Which One Will Prevail?…
Junk food addicts argue with health food nuts, asserting white bread to be the best. The health food nuts retaliate exclaiming about how much better store bought whole wheat bread is than white bread….
Leave a Reply
Honestly, I’ve probably had ramen noodles less than 10 times in my life. I’ve never been a fan. They always had a heaviness in flavor that didn’t appeal to me.
However, I like the pumpkin bowls; I did something similar last year with acorn squash filled with wild rice stuffing.
Nika,
Like you, I had my fill of Ramen noodles during the college years and I don’t ever crave them anymore! But here are a couple of ways I used to prepare them. Pan-fried (cook the noodles, drain them, fry in some oil until crisp on both sides, serve with a dash of rice vinegar and maybe soy sauce. I also liked to eat them boiled and drained with a dash of sesame oil and just a touch of the seasoning packet. I rarely ate them as soup and I usually ended up discarding most of the seasoning packet.
Curt: yours sounds delish. There is something about ramen noodles that engenders fans in some and dislike in others. Its certainly not Haute Cuisine!
Nicole: Pan-fried sounds mighty fine. I never usually go so far as to dirty another pan tho but thats what I am missing here, the added flavor, yours sounds yum. I also like them with sesame oil (anything with roasted sesame oil is awesome
.
I think its nasty as soup but I know some people are devoted to it as soup. I never use more than a slight sprinkle so we end up with like a 1:3 7/8ths open package to left over/unopen package ratio for every 4 packs made.
Nika, it looks delicious, but I react so badly to MSG — I’d have to find (gasp!) a healthier alternative…. I often cook with ramen noodles, but I throw out the seasoning packets.
Lydia: yeah, I know that feeling. I get a migrane and bad tunnel vision when exposed to MSG.. When I make the ramen, it has the tiniest sprinkles. When the husband does it, he likes to use a whole lot more, go figure! He must not get the same reaction.
I am going to see if I can track down a healthier version. Let me know if you find any.
This is sooo creative! I love your photos and your food stying is simply wonderful!
Anh: Many thanks! I love your photography too, you have a great eye for styling.
I use “plain Chinese Noodles” – I know it’s vague, but that’s what they’re called. They contain only wheat flour, water, and salt. They are basically Ramen noodles without any flavoring packet. I enjoy them in all sorts of mixtures – mostly in a veggie stir-fry, but I also enjoy them in a homemade soup that only contains chicken broth, plain Chinese noodles, sambal oelek, and lime juice. I have a recipe on my blog where I used Vermicelli noodles, but I use the plain Chinese noodles more often: http://forfood.rezimo.com/?p=328
Nicole: ooh, those look delish. I am going to see if I can find something like that. thanks for the link!
Nika, with these photos you have turned Ramen noodles into high cuisine! Looks FABULOUS!
Kathy: Thanks Ma’am! That was part of the fun
. Who knows, maybe I will work on another haute ramen dish soon.
I like to put frozen veggies in my ramen, and a sprinkling of black pepper. I don’t do much to fancy it up, true, but it’s a good way to get my veggie-phobic fiance to eat (vaguely) healthy things.
Aisling (love that name!) – excellent idea re: the veggies. Veggie-phobia is hard to beat but maybe you all kind find one he reallly loves and then build from there.
Nika, hi… just found you through Tastespotting and I love your blog! I’m definitely making the potato soup asap. And although I realise I’m quite late chiming in on the subject of ramen, you happen to have hit upon one of my comfort foods.
Unless it’s spicy, kimchi-flavour Korean ramen, I never bother with the seasoning packets. I dress up ramen with all sorts of things–it’s a good base for bits of leftovers, particularly vegetables. With veggies I might add a sprinkling of shredded cheese and my own seasonings–I don’t like it very soupy, but sometimes I might use a little organic broth. I’ve also put kimchi in ramen (I’m a kimchi ADDICT), shredded up veggie burgers, grilled and chopped portabella mushrooms… the list goes on and on.
One thing I ate when I was a desperately poor college student (I notice that’s a ramen theme here in your comments
was tuna in ramen with a little bit of cheese and/or olives. My mother insists it’s “grouch food” (as in only the grouches on Sesame Street would ever eat it on purpose), but it’s surprisingly good and I even turned my sister on to it when SHE became a starving student.
Uhmm, what I recently found had an interesting taste in chicken flavored top ramen is a nearly whipped egg put in when the noodles are done yet the liquid is still boiling and I put in some cut green onion tops. That didn’t work so well because they had a weird crisp crunchy texture that shouldn’t be in something hot. Next time I make this however, I think I will put in the green onion before the noodles are done so that the flavor boils up more and they soak up more water. But it was delicious none the less.