Now, I’m not one that will argue that fast food, ie. McD’s, Burger King, and all of that ilk, are good for you. I’m simply not that dumb. However, I find crap like this to be annoying. Why? Because you have a choice.
You can choose not to order the Triple Yummy Heartstopping Burger of Death with Ginormous-size fries and the Big Bubba Pop (Yes, I said pop, because soda is what you put in your fridge to keep it smelling nice!). Or you can choose to order the Heartstoppers Super Duper Non-Value Meal and stick your foot one inch further into the grave.
One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve been shopping for food in the supermarkets: the “Organic” section gets bigger and bigger everytime I go. Now, when I shop for food, I know the typical rules of how to buy food, all learned from my mother. I generally go for “does it look fresh?” then do the typical checks of squeezing (if needed), feeling, and possibly thumping. (no, I don’t thump melons! I watch Alton Brown too!) What I’ve really been wanting to know about organic food however, is simple:
What makes organic food better?
My knowledge of organic foods is very little, and very weak. For those of you who have just about the same knowledge, please keep up. For those of you who have more knowledge of organic foods, please correct me where I am wrong.
This is yet another installment of my “how to eat...” series. Today, I’ll be showing you how to prepare and actually eat ramen. Now, I’m not talking about the cheap-o Top Ramen or Maruchan Ramen noodles.
I’m not even talking about the “instant” ramen that comes in dehydrated blocks of noodles. I’m talking about “real” ramen. I give you exhibit A. What you’re seeing here is a bag of “real” ramen, and what I mean by that is that the ramen noodles are “fresh” and not dehydrated.
Inside you’ll find 3 packets of ramen noodles, with 3 packets of soy sauce based soup base. None of this is powder folks.
Now, first you want to put the soup base in your bowl, as show in exhibit C and D. Once you have that set up, you can start boiling your water and getting ready to put the noodles in the water.
Once you get your water to a rolling boil, insert your ramen noodles. Because the ramens are not dehydrated blocks (yay!), it won’t take very long to cook them. You’re talking maybe 3 minutes. you want to be able to cook them well for 3 minutes because they are very starchy and it’s a good thing to get rid of that. Here’s a short video on what the boiling ramen should look like:
After your 3 minutes are up, you want to drain your noodles well, and make sure most of the water is out of them. You don’t want to rinse them at all. There’s no need to do so. Then make sure you put hot water into the ramen bowl with the soup base, and now you’ll have a bowl of soup.
Carefully drop the noodles into the soup. Then you’re done making ramen! It’s rather very simple. Once you are done, feel free to add any toppings you’d like, I’m particularly fond of sliced boiled eggs, bamboo shoots, nori (seaweed), and naruto, which is a swirly type of Kamaboko. You can see it in the end result below:
What follows from this time is an educational video, brought to you by yours truly. Please keep an open mind when viewing this. The slurping is perfectly normal.
When you’re seriously broke, what do you eat the most of? You know what I’m talking about. When you’ve got that extra step day where you can only spend 10 bucks for the week, what kind of foods do you eat?
Here’s what I lived on when I was totally broke and poor:
- Instant Ramen. Seriously. You can buy this at the supermarket for like 10 for 1 buck. I’m not talking about fancy shmancy ramen. I’m talking about Top Ramen. It’s dirt cheap. Actually, I still eat it!
- Spaghetti. Believe it or not, I thought of many many different types of sauces for spaghetti, and the actual spaghetti is cheap! If you buy the generic no brand spaghetti, I’ve seen 5 lb bags for about a buck or two. Seriously. You can live on spaghetti for a long time. Add a little butter and garlic to the spaghetti and voila, dinner!
- Mac and cheese. You can get these relatively cheap. And if you are able to get hot dogs, you can combine them together. Holy cow, how can anyone not eat this! It’s good stuff.
So tell me, what do you eat when you’re broke?
(A plug for Pandora who gave me the idea for this post)
I’m not exactly sure what I ate today, but it sure was good. Actually there are a lot of days when I can say that exact same phrase. I walked with a few people from work through the wet markets today to get to a little Vietnamese restaurant in Central. Central is the name of the district I work in.
Hmm… I suppose I should explain what a “wet market” is. Wet markets are like other outdoor markets in Hong Kong with open air stores and vendors setting up stalls along the street . The biggest difference is that in a wet market you find live or recently living things, generally to eat. You can find everything from groceries, fresh fruit & vegetables, live chickens and seafood, pork and chicken meat hanging from hooks, disembodied giant fish heads, flowers, live chickens and spices. They are pretty cool, but the ground is always wet from live wells at the fish vendors, people spraying off butcher blocks and watering flowers. Therefore: wet market.
OK, back to the story. So we get to the Vietnamese restaurant and two of us put in our orders for what we call “greasy noodles.” Then we all walked to the Corner Noodle (that’s what it translates to) and the others put in their order for local Chinese food. I wander around a little and look at a store selling commercial refrigerated displays and some cool plants at a flower shop. The Chinese food comes up and we head back the Vietnamese place to pick up our food. It still wasn’t ready. Slow….
Anyway, after one of our co-workers complains in Cantonese to them, they get the order out and we all walk back through the wet market to the office. They threw in some free desserts to make up for the wait. Local desserts are icky. More on that later. So what are greasy noodles? Well, I’m not exactly sure but I will try and explain.
Greasy noodles are kinda like spaghetti noodles in size, shape and color but maybe a bit smaller in diameter. They are cooked and then maybe lightly stir-fried in oil but that’s just a guess. There is meat which I believe was pork and/or chicken as well as large strips of brown-ish stuff which didn’t taste like much so I assumed it was tofu of some sort. Then there’s diced white and green onions, slivers of red pepper and carrots and something that looked a little like corn flakes but not quite. And maybe a bit of oil or grease.
I know that is a splendid description but it’s the best I can do. Seriously though it’s really good. It’s relatively dry so it can be eaten completely with chopsticks and no need for a spoon.
For my very first post on this hello! Food site, I’ll share with you some fun information. Starting with the fact that if you dig far enough you actually will make it to China.
I have lived the first 30+ years of my life in or around St. Louis, MO. For those of you unsure of the location of St. Louis, or maybe even Missouri, it’s dead center of the Midwest portion of the United States of America. Does that seem odd to say that? Then you have no idea how many times people ask “Where is that? Near (Colorado, Texas, France, etc.)?” I kid you not. So food-wise, I come from the city that is nearly famous for being the birthplace of ice cream cones, toasted ravioli, hot dogs in buns, and other things that I can’t recall right now. As about as American as you get, we have every conceivable variation on steak, bar-b-que, Italian, Mexican and so on and so forth. You know… American food.
So we went to Arby’s the other day, and while looking at the drive-thru menu on what to get, the drive-thru attendant told us “Oh, by the way, we just ran out of roast beef.” We were speechless. How does this happen at Arby’s? Aren’t they all about roast beef? I was considering a Market Fresh sandwich, like the Ultimate BLT (yum!) but, honestly, I wanted Arby’s because I wanted roast beef. So we said no thanks and left.
