Everybody Loves Ramen: Recipes, Stories, Games, and Fun Facts About the Noodles You Love by Eric Hites
My rating: 3/5 cats
OCTOBER PROJECT IS OVER!!
let’s see if this goes better than last month…
Cow and Chicken Surprise
MISE:
i used two tomatoes instead of one tomato because they were too nice-looking to pass up, which is not often the case in october.
ok, obviously i gotta cool it with the pictures or this will be one of those project reviews that spills over into three different spaces, but i’m not sure how best to structure this yet, so i’m in wide-net mode.
this took about 10 minutes to make, which is probably going to be standard for the recipes in this book and is exactly the time i have available for feeding myself these days. i stepped away from the stove to tidy something and it all bubbled up while my back was turned, so i ended up with some milk/seasoning packet clots which are unattractive but didn’t affect the taste at all. and this was really good. i can’t remember the last time i had this really cheap ramen stuff, but it was better than i remember. i’m by no means a fancy person, but if i’m going to buy ramen for home use, i usually get what i call “rich people ramen”
which is not expensive at all, but is a little fancier than this 4/$1.00 kind. so, we are off to a good start! famous last words?
Hog ’n’ Cheese Mix and Melt
i will post this one soon, but suffice it to say there may be a reason that this cookbook doesn’t have any pictures.
MISE:
this was a disaster. i will take some of the blame, because they only had tiny ham steaks at the store, so i bought two of them, which may have been too much ham. but that’s all i’m willing to accept as a personal contribution to this failure.
i mean, really…
i followed the directions, which clearly say to drain the noodles:
heh—drain the noodles. heh—cut the cheese.
but if you drain the noodles, lemme tell you—that cheese isn’t going to melt. and you’re left with a chunky bowl of wayyyy too salty garbage food which i redeemed by putting in the cowboy pan and heating through in the oven, although there was still way too much ham.
if i were to make this again (which i won’t, but come with me anyway), i wouldn’t drain it, which is my tip to you. it would help with the melting and the saltiness and probably some other things, too. world peace? we will never know. thanks a lot, book.
Death Valley Treat
MISE:
i’m not impressed with this book yet.
it’s just so inconsistent. this one called for three packages of ramen, some use only one, many recipes call for “any flavor” ramen or unspecified herbs, this one called for either canned tuna or canned chicken which is some dharma and greg approach to cooking i can’t get behind.
it was fine, but three packages of ramen is way too much ramen, especially since these days i get home from work around 8 am and dinnertime still doesn’t make sense that early, but that’s where we’re at. this book better step up its game soon.
Crabby Spinach Ramen
MISE:
this was not disgusting! there may be hope for this book yet! i don’t think it’s sold me on canned spinach, and i did not add the extra salt the recipe called for because that’s just crazy talk, but otherwise, not a train wreck!
Ramen Cookie Delight
MISE:
this book is full of lies. first of all, the ingredients call for “semoa” cookies and the book claims:
You can buy these by name in any store. You can also buy Girl Scout cookies known as Caramel Delights, which are semoa cookies.
these are my favorite girl scout cookies, and i documented my taste-testing of all the available non-GSC variants on here a couple years back, so i am as much an authority on them as it is possible to be, and there is no such thing as a “semoa cookie.” go on and google it. or bing it, i don’t care. i got excited, thinking it was a thing that existed that i didn’t know about, but no. now, there IS such a thing as a “samoa” cookie, but it’s also a girl scout cookie, and it’s basically the same thing as a caramel delite, but it’s a regional thing dependent upon which girl scout elves make the cookies in your area. so, like caramel delites, they are only available during a particular window. so, NO, book, you CANNOT buy these by name in any store, no matter how you spell it. and if i wanted to be a pill about it (and right now i do), i would say “OH, RLY, BOOK? ANY STORE? CAN I BUY THEM AT THE HARDWARE STORE?” and of course, the answer is “no,” because semoas do not exist.
anyhoooo, during the great GSC-knockoff experiment, i discovered that these keebler jobbies were the closest to actual caramel delites, so i used them for this recipe. it was weird.
raw crunchy noodles, best-cookie-ever crumbles, and chicken-msg blend. i don’t know what to make of it. i don’t think i like it, but i keep dipping my hand in to grab more to make sure i don’t like it. there’s something oddly appealing about it, but i’d never waste precious cookies making it again.
Cheesy Ramen3
MISE:
first of all, i do not know why this is called cheesy ramen3 (or why that 3 won’t stick as an exponent). it only calls for ONE slice of cheese. (i used 2) do exponents mean nothing anymore? anyway, this one was pretty good, and i enjoyed the challenge of keeping the ramen in its tidy cube and cracking an egg on top of it in the water, marshaling all the stray egg-bits back to the fold. it was like a little game.
it is ready for its close-up
this one is a thumbs-up. keep up the good work, book…
Top-Speed 3-Minute Ramen
MISE:
i don’t see how this is any speedier than any of the others. i had to wash and cut all the vegetables, which took longer than three minutes, and the ramen is the same as in any of the recipes, but i suppose when i write a cookbook i can name the recipes whatever i want and until then, yadda yadda.
this one was tasty. i used the chicken picante flavor instead of the plain chicken ramen the recipe called for to increase pizzazz. can you see how much more pizzazz this has? i also used extra radishes because they were tiny and i like radishes. because i am a fraggle.
Rootin’ Tootin’ Ramen Chili
MISE:
this is a good idea, in that i never though about adding noodles to chili and making a ramen-chili concoction (this book actually has THREE ramen-chili concoctions), but canned chili is kind of nasty. not so nasty that an entire bag of cheese doesn’t go a long way towards improving it, but it’s a combination of weird taste/weird texture and cheese can only do so much. it tastes better cold straight out of the fridge at 8 a.m. after working a very physical job for ten hours. or maybe it just tastes like how bad my life is so it feels appropriate. in any event, chili and ramen, recipe 1:
Wanna-Be Italian Ramen
MISE:
i’m making the ultra-quick ones during the week; the ones i can whip up groggily at 8 am, eat, sleep all afternoon, and then go back to work. but this one fooled me. it’s a vague recipe, calling for “chopped garlic, herbs, and/or spices, to taste,” but there’s no point where it tells you to actually cook the garlic, and i’m not eating raw garlic in noodles like some beast, so this was not the one-pot dish i thought it was. not that it’s hard to sauté garlic and basil; it’s just an extra step i hadn’t factored in.
as far as a “recipe,” it’s pasta, garlic, olive oil, and basil. not pushing any culinary envelopes, but also not trying to pass off cookies and raw noodles as something fit for human consumption.
Zesty Ramen Omelets
MISE:
a noodle omelet!
i’m kind of impressed with this one.
weird idea, but it really worked. the recipe told me to use my “favorite” cheese, but i didn’t think burrata would work in this environment, so i used a block of velveeta, which is quite good in omelets.
this one i would make again.
and now – the moment we’ve all been waiting for…
Orange “PEZ” Chicken Soup
MISE:
i was supposed to garnish this with the pez not actually used in the soup, but there was no picture to show me how to garnish it, so i had to figure it out on my own, although some friends gave me a hand.
verdict: only a little bit weird! it was not as sweet as i thought it would be, because the smokiness of the peppers ate up the candy taste, but my mind is reeling from a the concept of a soup containing both rice AND noodles. i like the idea of dissolving pez in broth, and since i had to buy an industrial sized bag of pez just to get enough orange packets to make this recipe (none of the 4-packs or 8-packs contained a single orange pack. is orange the least popular pez flavor?), i might experiment a bit.
and that was PEZ soup! happy friday the 13th!
Easy Cheesy Ramen
MISE:
sorry there has been no ramen for a couple of days, but there was a mini-revolt in my house by an anti-ramen faction. and speaking of revolt(ing)
this was…not good. i do not understand the measurements in this recipe, but i follow the rules and take what comes. but see if this makes sense to you: one packet of ramen = 3 oz. and to these drained noodles you are meant to add 1 c sour cream (which is 8 oz), 1/2 c mustard (which is 4 oz), and then 1 c. swiss cheese, 2 oz parmesan cheese and a seasoning packet. and this is how mustard/sour cream soup is made
and it does not taste very good. the mustard was supposed to be “sweet-hot mustard” which is not a thing i have ever seen, so i just got gulden’s and maybe that made all the difference, but i doubt it.
all i know is that it makes a fine homunculus
rrraarrrrrrr
despite forcing me to eat nasty food, i still think this is a better project than last month.
Upstream Salmon Ramen
MISE:
look, actual vegetables! and also a successful recipe with pleasing flavors! thank goodness. it looks a little soupy, but that’s because i was ramen-shy, having been burned too many times and not wanting to commit to potentially making another giant bowl of yuk, so i only used ONE ramen packet instead of the two the recipe called for. and i’d meant to simply halve the other ingredients, but i was on sleepy follow-the-directions autopilot before i remembered that plan. so it made one soupy bowl of ramen with much leftover sauce, which i’ll just put over different pasta.
i’d almost forgotten what tasty was like.
Flaming Poultry and Peanuts
MISE:
two in a row that were delicious?? birds are singing, the world is full of color, my faith in life restored. this actually made a huge batch; this is about half of it:
i am very pleased with this one, and i would definitely make it again – it is real food with real ingredients and even sean of the house approved. this is a good way to go out, because i have run out of room in this review-space, so i’m going to have to finish up the month on a different edition. i’ll post the link once it is set up, but thanks for being here!
Ramen Pizza Party
MISE:
the recipe called for salt in the ingredients list, yet never said when to add it. but if there’s one thing none of the recipes in this book need, it’s salt. it could use a lesson in measurements, though. and maybe what the word “pizza” means. my people are french, so it’s not like i have a cache of old family recipes for pizza or any special insight into the pizza arts, but surely there’s a better word for a dish of noodles, sauce and cheese than “pizza.”
again, this one looks really gross, mostly because the mixture of egg, milk, and parmesan cheese that was meant to act as a binding agent and turn a heap of cooked noodles into a pizza crust was disproportionate to the amount of noodles, and ended up mixing with the sauce and causing bright orange runoff, a ton of which i poured off before photographing this.
part of it was my fault, because i don’t own a pizza pan, so i wasn’t able to corral the sauce into the pizza-shape (i was going for a sicilian with mine), and the directions do clearly direct the chef to build up an aluminum-foil rim around the pizza tray, which would have kept it all together. but not when to add the salt. and maybe that would have made all the difference, but it still seemed to be more liquid than necessary.
it might be wiser to make this in stages if you don’t have a pizza pan—maybe try to set the “crust” first so there’s a more solid platform to dump everything else on, or maybe make it super thin “crust” and cover the whole baking sheet. it tasted great, but like the other italian one that was just garlic, cheese, and olive oil, it’s been pretty well-established that these flavors work together, and if the only new concept here is making it into a pizza shape, maybe we don’t need to mess with a good thing.
Creamy Ramen Mushroom Soup
MISE:
man—i feel like i haven’t made a ramen in ages, and i’m sorry for taking a couple of days off, especially this close to the end of the project knowing so many ramen-based delicacies will go untried. but life, she is a joker and dislikes me very much. but look, creamy mushroom soup!
this will be the first and most likely the only time i will ever say this during this project, but this one could have used more seasoning. i know. it’s crazy. thankfully, it is not disgusting or anything, it’s just a bit bland. i added some pepper and a dash of magical unicorn salt
and it made all the difference. i added too much parsley because i didn’t want it to languish in my fridge, but too much parsley = opportunity to do giraffe impression, SO AT LEAST THERE WAS THAT.
i will try to squeeze in as many as i can in what remains of october. if i live that long.
the month is almost over, and i’ve only managed to make 16/50 recipes. to be honest, some of these put me off my feed a little, and i was unenthusiastic about revisiting them as leftovers, but since i hate throwing food away, the struggle to get through them prevented me from making new unappetizing meals. BUT—because i am essentially an optimist, with the last five days of the month, i am going to get on the one-a-day rallywagon. i made one last night, but photobucket is up to its old tricks and preventing me from uploading pictures. but here’s a schedule of what’s to come, for those of you anxious about what concoctions i am going to expose my insides to. the final five ramens aaaaaaaare:
A Vegetarian’s Slipup
Chili Cheese Dip à La Ramen
Vegetarian’s Power Dish
The Gobble Gobble Asian Noodle Delight
What’s Up, Doc? Ramen Pancakes
wow, okay, photobucket was being a jerk for a while. totally worth 400 bucks. SO—here’s a bunch of ramens:
A Vegetarian’s Slipup
MISE:
this was an all-around winner. in fact, i barely got to have any because sean of the house gobbled it up so fast, and declared it to be like what you’d get at “a fancy restaurant.” what i managed to wrest away from him was wonderful. this might become a thing i make on a regular basis, which is not something i anticipated even halfway through this project—that i would ever make any of these again.
beef, beets, red onions, cold noodles, greens, vinegar and horseradish. simple and perfect.
Chili Cheese Dip à La Ramen
MISE:
basically, this is a giant bowl of melted cheese. which is not something i’m ever gonna say “no” to. but it’s also a heckuva lot of sour cream, and with the beans and all that, it might not be the best for a cheese-loving, lactose-intolerant person like me. because i’ll just keep shoving it in my face despite consequences. good thing to know, though—not all canned chili is disgusting. i bought this OOOH, I’M ORGANIC kind, and it was good and not metallic-tasting or fluorescent, and even though it got drowned in the dairy, it was better than the last canned chili situation. there’s no need for ramen in this, though. you break the noodles up into tiny pieces and then completely forget they are there. save your quarter for laundry.
cheeeeeese!
it’s more practical to eat this with chips. but do let me know if you can see any ramen here:
The Gobble Gobble Asian Noodle Delight
MISE:
for the record, this is the grossest-sounding recipe name ever, like something you’d get an STD from. but as food, it’s pretty good.
you have to increase the amount of water it calls for in order to even cook the noodles and broccoli, and it is a little bland, but it is not disgusting, and at this point, that’s all i hope for.
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okay, halloween got in the way of this project because i wanted to eat candy all night instead of ramen. but i bought the ingredients for the pancakes and i will make them and post them asap. just a small extension of october project, although i HAVE already begun november project because candy does not get in the way of coloring. thank you for your patience! ♥
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thank you for being patient! the first few days of november have been a jumbly mess, but here i am to post the VERY LAST ramen recipe, and we are going out on a relatively high note with
What’s Up, Doc? Ramen Pancakes
MISE:
this recipe calls for unspecified “garnish,” so i have decided that’s as good a name as any for my little pink monster. (NOT a euphemism)
with garnish
these were plenty good, and i’m glad i made them. i had to adjust the proportions a bit, since “1 carrot” is an imprecise measurement, and i ended up with way more grated carrot than noodles, and they were a little too butter-drippy, but all in all a successful dish, especially for this book, which handed out more bitter disappointments than umami along the way.
before i go, i feel like i ought to review the book-part of the book, not just the recipes. i’ve already mentioned the lack of food photographs, which i find baffling in a cookbook, but in place of the photos, there are many…other choices. every recipe is followed by this:
which i guess is a cute idea, but i’d much rather have had pictures of the finished dish. there are also multiple pages of ramen lore, which are more “ramen anecdotes” than anything approaching the lofty heights of lore:
and that is some pretty qualified praise.
this bit of “lore” reads like the start of ramen-erotica, which i’m sure is a thing
there are also many ramen facts:
which are too dumb to even be deemed “filler.” and then there’s an invitation to anagram the word “ramen,” a ramen-themed word search and a ramen-themed crossword puzzle for the true brainiacs. long story short, there are many things cluttering up the pages that are not photographs of the dishes which, along with the end results of some of these recipes, makes me wonder if any of them were actually field-tested, or if this was all a very elaborate prank on me, orchestrated by someone who knew that if there was a cute cartoon cat on the cover of a cookbook, i would be drawn to it like a moth to a flame, with similarly unpleasant results.
regardless, october project is OVER, and november project well on its way to being as exhausting but in a whole different way! variety! spice o life!
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here are the recipes that remain. there are a lot. i’ve starred the ones i bookmarked in the book as “wanna makes,” but the end of the month is drawing nigh, so i won’t be able to test them all. tough choices ahead.
*Stroganoff Ramen-Style
*911 Heart Attack Ramen
Fourth o’ July Confetti Bean Salad
Chili Fish Ramen
*Chicken in Gravy over Ramen
*Popeye Cashew Ramen
Fit-for-a-King Salad
Four-Alarm Fish Ramen
*Thai-One-On Ramen
*Rip-Roaring Ramen Chili
*Odds-and-Ends Hearty Ramen Soup
*Hawaiian Chicken Ramen
*Big Shrimp Omelets
Cholesterol-Killer Ramen
Elvis’s Fav’ Gravy Ramen
*Porky’s Stir-Fry
Pseudo Szechwan Ramen
Saturday Brunch Ramen
Kickin’ Dduk-Boki
Poppin’ Broccoli Slaw
Buttery Sesame Ramen
*Cheap-as-It-Gets Ramen Salad
Florentine à la Polo and Newman
Hijacked Taco Bell Ramen
Super Pregnancy Ramen
*Custom Kimche Ramen-Style
*Super Ramen Burritos
Red-Nosed Ramen
*La Chico’s Hearty Soup
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