Gourmet Ramen Noodles

I have a vice that probably shouldn't be mentioned on a food blog, but you're also not supposed to stop posting for over a week. We're breaking all the rules here. My vice is a love for ramen noodles. I can see you making that face.

If you do it right, ramen noodles are delicious and easy, I swear. Before I get started on how good ramen is, I'll point out the main reason not to eat them: instant noodles are generally high in carbohydrates but low in fiber, vitamins and minerals--Basically empty calories. But they're really cheap and come in such nice single-serving packages. Plus, it's kind of hard to find non-instant ramen noodles in the middle of the U.S. And we're going to add all kinds of wonderful things that'll make you feel much better about eating instant ramen noodles.

You've still got that face on. I'll have you convinced by the time we get through this recipe. The following is only one of many combinations of ingredients I've used, but it's a standby for me:

1 pack of instant ramen
-See that instant broth packet? Step #1 is to throw it in the garbage. Next, go ahead and toss those noodles in some boiling water to get them started.

4 oz (half a package) of mushrooms, sliced
-Fry these guys in light oil or butter while your noodles are boiling.

soy sauce
chili garlic sauce
fresh ground pepper
lemon juice
As much broccoli as you like, bite-sized pieces

-When the noodles are 1/2 done, drain some of the water, so there is just enough to cover the noodles in the pan.
-Add seasonings to your tastes; I like at least a tablespoon of soy sauce, a heavy teaspoon of chili garlic sauce (that's a lot for most people), 6 or so turns of pepper, and a tablespoon of lemon juice. Amounts will vary greatly on how much water is in the pan. If it seems like a lot of salt that you're adding, keep in mind that most of it stays in the broth and doesn't go into your mouth.
-Stir the seasonings into the water, then add the broccoli on top of the noodles and cover.
-Reduce heat
-The broccoli steams while the noodles are infused with flavors.

1 small tomato, bite-sized diced

Finally, add all ingredients to a bowl big enough to contain them. My sister gave me a couple of perfect ramen bowls from CB2 (the big ones are for ramen). Their website calls them serving bowls, but don't listen to their lies.

Seriously, I love this stuff. It's my lunch probably 3 days a week.

Now that you know the standard procedure, experiment with your own additions. Other toppings that are great: hard boiled eggs (sliced, obviously), spinach (traditionally it's seaweed, but this works pretty well), kimchi, and thinly sliced meats. You can also mix up the seasonings. Substitute salt for the soy sauce and add a dose of curry powder and cumin, for instance.

Soup and Stew Sunday #4: $%&# vegetable soup

Poor Ben. He had a long day. He lifted heavy things at the gym this morning. He did his python homework all afternoon. It was probably inevitable that the challenge of a recipe-less stew would be too much for him.

"So, I don't remember how this whole stew thing works. Do you fry stuff? This is why we need a blog. Don't we have a blog thing? Go look at the blog and see how we make stew. What? We haven't written one of those yet? Urghhhh..."

Probably I should be helping.

...Anyway, the soup was un-delicious, so we're not going to blog about it.

Soup and Stew Sunday 3#: Rival Tomato Soup

How is it Sunday again already? I am falling way behind on this whole blog thing. It's a good thing Carolyn manages to keep a schedule, or the blog would never get updated.

Well anyway, I'm here to tell you about the soup we made a week ago, so it doesn't get lapped by tonight's soup. We went with a traditional tomato soup. Yes, we made a tomato soup the week before. No, we do not consider tomato soup two weeks in a row "completely half-assed." Besides that tomato soup was way out there, chipotle peppers and ground up tortilla chips?! In a soup?! What? So we had to bring it back to Earth, and make a nice, wholesome, regular tomato soup that everyone can get on board with. Now, it's been a week, so the following recipe is only going to vaguely resemble what we ate, unless Carolyn comes in and edits it. Carolyn's roommate, who's name will remain "Carolyn's roommate" because I don't know whether she wants to be positively identified on the Internet (yea, I capitalized it. I mean this one, the one everybody uses, not some other, lowercase internet), supplied the recipe and the role of head chef, so maybe she has the real thing written down somewhere. Bare (bear?) with me as I attempt to recreate the magic of last week's culinary masterpiece. (Everything Carolyn and I make in the kitchen is a culinary masterpiece, by the way. The art institutes of the world simply have yet to realize it.) To the recipe:

3 cloves garlic, minced
4 or so carrots, sliced 
2 stalks celery, sliced

fry in oil for a few minutes, you know the drill by now.

1 (28 oz) can of crushed tomatoes
1 (14 oz) can of diced tomatoes
3 cups of vegetable stock
Some spice, might have been thyme?
Salt and pepper
"4 drops" of hot sauce
some amount of Worcestershire, might have been a tablespoon?

Toss that junk in, let the whole business simmer for, oh, say 20 minutes. Then blend the thing up. All of it.

This soup was a perfect simple tomato soup. There's nothing offensive in it, but the flavor is strong enough to satisfy. Whereas last week's tomato soup stole the show from anything else you might eat with it, this soup is great to serve next to grilled cheese, which is what we did. Carolyn had made croutons from her leftover french bread (no post about croutons, Carolyn?) and we also garnished it with slices of avocado.

As you can see, there was a lot of filler in the entry, mainly because I have the memory of a porpoise, so sorry about that. The soup was good, you should try it. That's all for now.

Stir Fry update

For those of you who haven't heard, Ben and I really like to make stir fry. Last night was yet another winner, so I'm going to log our latest updates to the standard recipe:

In addition to the usual vegetables (carrot, broccoli, mushroom, green pepper) we added a thickly sliced white onion. We added the onion midway through the cooking so that it wouldn't get too soft.

For the sauce, I borrowed the formula from one of the Moosewood's stir fries:

1 Tablespoon grated ginger root
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon Chinese chili paste
2 Tablespoons soy sauce
1 Tablespoon white vinegar 
1 teaspoon cornstarch 

Mix the sauce together and stir in with vegetables when they are just about done cooking. Note that this time we grated the ginger; in the past we have minced it, but I think grating worked much better because it released some of the ginger juices.

The sauce was perfect--the best we've made so far, in my opinion. The added onion worked really well in this slightly sweet stir fry. This might be the last blog post we'll be making, because Ben and I have decided that we are going to eat this exact stir fry for all of our meals from now on.

Friday Night hodge podge

Last Friday, the girlfriend (that's Carolyn) and I ended up eating an assortment of snacks, left-overs, and junk-food instead of making dinner. This is what happens when we don't make a plan. Anyway, on to the recipe:

Corn tortilla chips
Newman's salsa

Open both, pour a measure of salsa into another container if you want to be sanitary (we didn't), and gorge yourself while watching Dr. Who. Wash down with soda or milkshakes

Asparagus
Sour patch kids

Fry asparagus in some oil on highest heat, add salt/pepper or whatever you like (we used season salt) while frying. Don't overcook asparagus, but try to get it a little seared. Should still be crisp inside. For sour patch kids, eat directly from the box. Pair with more soda and tv.

Finish meal with one-too-many cookie dough balls and milk.


I have to be honest, it wasn't the best idea. Carolyn and I both managed to give ourselves upset stomachs by about 8:00. I recovered after eating some fresh green beans. Carolyn somehow thought that Fresca would help, so she had that. On the whole though, the food was good. Next time, I think more asparagus, maybe along with some sort of main-dish, and then leave out the sour patch kids and chips and salsa. Minor changes really.

---------------

Hey, Fred! Do you want a green bean?

No? Fine, be that way.

Cookie Dough Balls

I stumbled upon this recipe on the All Recipes website and Ben's been pushing me to make these for a while now. Friday's junk-food-night-extravaganza seemed like the perfect time to take the recipe out for a spin:

1 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups brown sugar, packed
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 tablespoon water
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup milk chocolate chips

Cream butter and sugar together. Mix in remaining ingredients. Roll into balls (I did walnut-sized and big-marble-sized). Freeze for at least 2 hours. Dip in melted chocolate almond bark (may also be called "candy coating") and let solidify. Store in freezer. If you are a fun-loving person like me, add sprinkles after dipping in chocolate (act quickly, these set up fast). 

The original recipe called for mini chocolate chips and I would most definitely go with that next time. The regular-sized chips are too big and chunky. We tried with and without dipping in chocolate, but both Ben and I agreed that the coating adds a necessary element; I think the hard coating makes these seem more like an intentional dessert and less like you're just stealing cookie dough before you've baked the cookies.

Soup and Stew Sunday #2: Spicy Tomato Soup

Well, it's Tuesday, and that means I'm late in putting up our recipe for Soup and Stew Sunday. Over the weekend, we made a really amazing tomato soup, recipe from one of Carolyn's Moosewood Cookbooks (Carolyn, check to make sure that link is the right book). You'll need a blender for this recipe. Without further ado, here's our recipe:

3 cups chopped onion
2 tablespoons of oil

As usual, saute the onions in the oil. Saute them lightly; you'll see that the onion is only ingredient that has crunch, so you do not want to overcook it.

2 teaspoons cumin
1 teaspoon oregano

Add these spices to the onion and saute another minute or two to let the flavors fry into the onion and oil.

1 quart tomato juice
1 can of diced tomatoes
3 tablespoons minced chipotle peppers in adobo sauce (this can be found canned in most grocery stores)

Add these ingredients and let it cook for about 10 minutes. It gets interesting next.

2 cups corn tortilla chips, blended up
3 cups of the soup

Blend the chips into the soup until it is a single emulsification. Pour it in with the rest of the soup (use a little water or tomato juice or non-blended soup to get it all out properly). Then stir it all together.

Garnish with anything green (the book recommends avocado, which would be awesome).

This soup was one of my favorites to date. I realize that our loyal readers are only aware of one other Soup and Stew Sundays recipe so far, but we've been doing this for months, so that's saying something. It was also fantastically filling. Carolyn made french loaf, sliced it up and made cheesy bread to go with it. Delicious.

A few notes about changes:
-The recipe called for vegetable stock rather than tomato juice; I'm very happy we went with the juice.
-I added more chipotle than the recipe called for. I would like to add even more in the future, but Carolyn thought it was a touch too spicy.
-At the time, I thought we used too much tortilla chip, but looking back, I was pretty happy with it. The recipe actually only calls for 1.5 cups, but I just tossed in all the leftovers of a bag.
-Next time less onion, more diced tomato.

Final thoughts: This soup only took about 45 minutes from start to finish, only requires 7 ingredients, and tastes amazing. I could see eating it year round, too. The only fresh ingredient is onion, so it could be considered a winter soup. The flavor really lends itself to pairing with fresh green things, though. Maybe it's a bit too hot to eat in middle of summer, but even then I probably wouldn't turn it down. Definitely making it again soon.

The perfect Pizza?

I know we had a post about pizza just a week ago, but this one was just so good it has to be logged. Carolyn made extra dough and I made extra sauce on the last pizza night, so all we had to do was pop a couple crusts out of the freezer and let them warm up for a few hours before baking. We did a few things differently this time, though, and I think this has become our new favorite.

I'm going to keep it brief by not going through all the cooking steps. See our last pizza post (link already provide above) if you need that info.

Toppings:
spinach
mushrooms (Ben's crazy, there were no mushrooms on this pizza. Love, Carolyn)
tomato slices (quartered)
shredded cheese
mozzarella chunks

We prebaked the crusts this time for 3-5 minutes, which turned out to be a great idea. It was just the right crispiness. We then added sauce, a layer of spinach (go ahead and be liberal; it always shrinks down), shredded cheese, then tomato, mushrooms, and mozzarella chunks. We used extremely little shredded cheese, opting to treat cheese as a topping rather than as a layer. If you've been following the blog, you've already read my rant about too much cheese on pizzas. Our pizzas tonight were a bold challenge against over-cheesed pizzas everywhere.

We had 2 pizzas, so we experimented with the placement of the spinach on the 2nd. Instead of putting it below the shredded cheese, we put it above with the rest of the toppings, to see if it would turn out differently. They both turned out great, but I thought the spinach didn't cook quite as well this way. It got a touch dried out.

This pizza was amazing. Top it with some black pepper or red pepper flakes for a delicious kick. I also sprinkled a little salt on the exposed tomato slices. Carolyn thinks it's gross how much salt I use; you probably feel the same way.

Lasagna

Made vegetable lasagna last night. I'd be remiss if I didn't post about this one, since at the conclusion of the meal Ben said, "we are going to have to make this at least once a week from now on." I'm completely on board with this plan; the lasagna was easy to make and delicious--two of my favorite qualities in a meal.

On to the recipe:


6 lasagna noodles (Our baking dish was on the short side, so we could only fit two layers.) (Also, we used oven-ready noodles that you don't have to cook before baking. I must admit I felt uneasy building a lasagna out of rock hard noodles, but I couldn't tell the difference once it was cooked.)
Pasta sauce, about 20 oz. (We used "spicy and zesty" pasta sauce, something I would definitely use again. If I were to make my own sauce I would make something on the order of what Ben's pizza sauce tastes like--plenty of spice.)
Roughly half a bunch of spinach, washed and stemmed 
Mushrooms, sliced, about 4 oz.
Shredded cheese (We used mozzarella, white cheddar, and parmesan)

And...... layer!

1. Light layer of sauce
2. Noodles (we fit three across in this pan)
3. Sauce
4. Vegetables
5. Tiny bit more sauce on top of vegetables for integration
6. Cheese
7. Repeat

Cook 40 minutes at 375. Let sit at least 10 minutes before serving so that it can congeal a bit.

Mmm. Delicious. Especially when served with Ben's grilled asparagus. Our lasagna shrunk a lot when baking. I'd like to work up to three layers so it doesn't look so flat when it comes out of the oven, but I think we'll need to find a taller baking dish for that.

I have a new Wok!

My birthday was last weekend, and Carolyn got me a wok! This is super awesome and super important because, as I'm sure you know from our cabbage stir fry post, we nearly always over fill the skillet with vegetables. Anyway, on Wednesday, we used our new wok to make one of our mainstay dishes, ginger-garlic stir-fry.

Stir-fries are very simple affair, and a fantastic way to make a healthy dish that's still tasty. At heart, stir-frying is just tossing bite sized pieces of food into a skillet with some oil, and taking them out before they burn. The only challenge is seasoning them properly. So before I tell you about the stir-fry we had on Wednesday, let me tell you the really easy way to make a stir-fry: just buy a stir-fry sauce from the grocery store. They come in a variety of flavors, and all you need to do is toss some in at the end of the cooking process and stir it around a bit. Easy as can be.

Anyway, ginger-garlic stir-fry:

1 teaspoon minced ginger
2 cloves minced garlic
1-2 tablespoons oil

Fry on high heat until garlic is beginning to turn brown. Then toss in your chopped veges. We used

carrot (might want to put this in right at the beginning. Carrot takes a while)
broccoli
mushrooms
green pepper

Continue frying until your veges are nearly cooked. I'm not going to give a time estimate, because there are a lot of factors that alter it, such as kind of oven, amount of oil, type of pan, and amount of veges crammed into that pan.

Once nearly cooked, add the following ingredients, already mixed together:

3 parts soy sauce
1 part cooking sherry
1 water
1 teaspoon corn starch

Add to taste.

Serve with rice or noodles or whatever you want.

Carolyn and I both love this particular stir-fry. Ginger and garlic are both silly cheap (only buy as much ginger as you need. Feel free to break a chunk off at the store), and add a different kind of spiciness to the stir-fry. As with all Asian cuisine, I love to add garlic chili sauce here and there to really kick up the spice (Post dedicated to this amazing sauce to come)(hoy fong foods, you're welcome for the free advertising). Also, its the rare stir-fry for us that doesn't have broccoli and mushrooms. We eat almost exactly this meal close to weekly.

Finally, a note on using my new wok. It holds so much food! Our meal looked paltry in this thing. Since it's teflon lined, the heat does distribute, but naturally the bottom was still much hotter than the sides, so a good amount of stirring is necessary. Also, tossing the food seemed to allow bits of garlic and ginger to fly out more easily than your typical skillet. Oh, and food took a little longer to cook.