savory

Ramen? Are you kidding me?

Nope.

It’s not all pastry and French food here, sometimes I want food and I want it quick. I know the lowly ramen isn’t what you would expect, but this is reality. Ramen is cheap, versatile, and easy to find.

There’s no reason to eat ramen just as it is: dried noodles with flavored broth package. With very little effort you can transform the paltry ramen into something you’d probably pay extra for outside of home. In fact, ramen doesn’t even need to be a soup, it can be transformed into anything from salad topping to what I have created here, yakiramen.

Yakiramen is my take on the Japanese dish, yakisoba. Yakirsoba is basically cooked soba and assorted vegetables stir fried. Replace the soba noodles with ramen and you get yakiramen. If you’re keeping score on the ramen, the noodles are fried, dried, boiled, and the fried once more. I guess you could call this refried ramen, but I don’t see that catching on anytime soon.

There’s not much of a recipe to this dish but here’s what’s in my creation. Ramen noodles (Top Ramen shown above), sliced carrots, green beans, cabbage. I used diced shallots and garlic for the aromatics and made a simple shoyu sauce (shoyu, vinegar, chile paste, water, and mirin). The sauce was thickened at the last minute with a small amount of corn starch slurry.

Here’s what the final dish looks like. Looks better than the picture on the package, eh?

© 2008 My Food Geek.