Survival Sunday 29: New Year's Nabe Ramen

I know, today isn't New Year's Eve, but I couldn't let that almost-alliteration pass me by!

My guy and I made Nabe Ramen (which autocorrect believes is "Nave" ramen, but hey, let's not split hairs...). This dish is a hot-pot, which means it's usually brought out to the table in the stoneware vessel it's cooked in. Z & I don't have a clay hot-pot, so we just simmered it on the stove for a good long while before ladling it over our prepared ramen noodles.

This is another delightful find from Umai Crate, who are not sponsoring this blog, but boy, do I love the noodles we get from them.

All of our Umai Crate spices, our sesame oil, and our teriyaki hot sauce.
Also: ramen noodles, red pepper flakes, and the soup bases for the Nabe.

Our Nabe ramen! Such a great photo...

The Shizumi Nabe Soup entry

Our veggies: green onion/scallion, little shiitake mushrooms, and a carrot.

Closeup of the hot sauce.

Now, as for an ingredients list:

Nabe soup base (we used all 3 servings!)
Ramen noodles (we used all 3 servings of this, too)
1 egg
green onion/scallion
carrot
shiitake mushrooms
frozen corn
roast beef lunchmeat slices
teriyaki hot sauce
curry powder
hot pepper
red pepper flakes
ramen pepper
garlic powder
sesame oil
soy sauce

If all of that seems like a lot, it is, but it's also unnecessary. You can, in fact, enjoy the Nabe with just the prepared soup base packets and the noodles. If you can find the Nabe soup packets. If not, then I suggest concocting your own sweet & salty broth using some brown sugar (that's what we think was in it), soy sauce, and any other herbs & spices that strike your fancy. It's a dark, reddish-brown broth, so we have no idea what we ate.

The first thing we did was we divided the labor. Z did 90% of this dish between his expert cutting and spicing skills. All I did was scramble the egg in a bowl with the sliced scallions and boil the noodles. I also stirred a little. Wow.

I boiled the noodles first, since it's suggested that you portion them out before the soup is finished.

Now, the instructions were, as they often are, a bit vague and confusing, so we winged it by using 1 cup of water per pair of soup packets (there were dry packets and wet ones, one of each, so by using 3 servings, I put in 3 cups of water). This meant that we got plenty of flavor & liquid in our massive bowls of ramen!

Z did all the work on the soup part, so I'll just put the photos down and do my best to narrate:

Here we have all of the packets added to the water.
The dry packets were what gave us the idea that this might contain brown sugar.

We've dumped in the sesame oil at this time.
I can't remember if we actually added the soy sauce, but I think we did!

We put the carrots in first, knowing they'd need the longest to cook.

Ah. Here's where we added the soy sauce!

We also added frozen corn, which brought the temperature back down.
I did most of the temperature fiddling, but again, Z did the hard work!

I'm not a huge fan of mushrooms, tbh.
They definitely added something very nice to the broth, though!

Weird tip: If you scramble egg and add your scallions to the egg,
you end up with these tiny omelets in your soup wrapped up in green onion!

Z hard at work, now that he's added more spices!

You wouldn't think plain lunchmeat would work in Nabe ramen.
You'd be wrong. It was delicious.

Our eggy scallions added in. This was moments after he dumped the bowl in!

Eggy, spicy, delectable scents were rising at this point and we couldn't wait any longer!

Z's bowl with its shiitake mushrooms!

My bowl had no mushrooms because I don't care for the texture.

In the end, this was a delight. Since I was still a little sick (and now I just get stuffy every so often, so I think I'm over the cold!), the amount of spice Z had added was perfect. My mouth was on fire, and my sinuses were clearing! To be fair, I'm pretty sure the Nabe seasonings from the pack weren't that spicy, but Z & I like a little fire in our bowls, so he ramped up the Scovilles just for us.

Hopefully, our kitchen experimentation here has inspired some of you to meddle with your instant noodles. Don't be afraid to add lunchmeat and let it cook up with your noodles. Experiment with your eggs. Toss in some veggies to give yourself some vitamins and leach out some of the sodium!

Basically...

Go Enjoy Something!!!
FC