Survival Sunday 211: Noodling Around

Oh boy. So, Umai Crate strikes again, guys, and this time, we've got a weird one on our hands. At first glance, it seems fine, but then you think about it...

To the right, we have a simple (if potent) red miso soup.
It's that weird little pack on the left we're going to have an experience with.

Let me just begin by saying that Umai Crate doesn't even know we exist, guys. We give them money and they give us noodles. Sometimes we leave comments on their Facebook page or whatever, but by and large, they don't know us from Adam, so you can easily guess that this is not a sponsored blog.

Guys, they've sent us some interesting stuff.

Oh, but you'll have to wait to see what was so odd about our most recent ramen adventure (not to be confused with they YouTuber of the same name...). First, let's talk about the soup:

A sharp, salty red miso paste that looks almost like barbecue sauce.
Here's a nice look down into the soup cup, complete with fill line that I can never see in real life.
Z gives me a lot of guff about this, and rightfully so.

The garnishes were simple - seaweed, tofu, green onion.
It's a miso soup. There's not a lot of bells & whistles in miso soup.
That's why it's so consistently good.

We had no worries about the red miso, especially since we both know now that we're okay with miso natto soup, and if you can get through that and say "not bad" then you can get through most any kind of miso.

But this is not Miso...

Japan is an island nation of impressive innovation, but they're not Europe or America and they have... interesting ideas on what European or American dishes should be. In this case, we received a Japanese take on an Italian staple: Spaghetti.

Guys. It's spaghetti ramen.

It's... well...

LOOK AT THESE NOODLES

I was cautiously optimistic when we heard about these in the newsletter, but... wow. When I opened the bag and saw weird, translucent, semi-gelatinous noodles in a baggie and a single powder pack I was a bit alarmed.

"Special Sauce", eh?

Oh, not just special, but DAMBD as well...

So, I started the pot to boiling with the requisite 1/4 cup water and... wait.  That's not very much water. What's going on here?!

Also, the kettle started hissing, so rather than endure the spine-crushing terror of the kettle going to full whistle (why is that a thing? Just watch your kettle), I quickly took it off the hob and poured it into the soup cup. After throwing on the lid, I settled in to watch the pot for the Spaghetti Ramen boil. Slowly.

We knew we'd enjoy the soup, at least...

If I were to do this again, I'd just move the pot onto the Rapid Boil burner to the bottom left so that it would boil faster.
Maybe then we wouldn't have had such a watery sauce.

Seriously, it looked & smelled kinda like the watery stuff you get from ketchup if you forget to shake it.

But I am nothing if not committed to cookery, so I soldiered on.
Also, I'm stupidly stubborn.

When I got the pan to bubble again, I added the gooey noodles to the pot.
They were cold.
They were slimy.
They were... surprisingly firm?

And they didn't look like any kind of pasta I've ever eaten.
Not even from a bland frozen dinner.
They were... odd.

The miso looked and tasted wonderful.

Okay, so what did the weird Ramen Spaghetti taste like, though?

It was....

It was okay.

The sauce was very tomatoey to its credit, though it was super watery (did I not boil it hard enough?) and lacked any nuance, but the noodles were straight-up weird. They were absolutely not made with any kind of flour I've ever had. In fact, Z & I strongly suspect some sort of gourd involvement, because those noodles tasted and crunched like spaghetti squash.

Sadly, neither of us speaks or reads Japanese, so we have no idea if that's what we were eating. For all I know, it was supposed to be agar noodles. I'm cool with that.

As a spaghetti, it fails. As a ramen, it fails. But I can't say that it's bad. It's just weird. We crammed a load of ramen pepper into it, and that definitely helped, but I'd have to add some herbs and maybe some scrambled chicken or something to it if I were going to try it again...

Also, I should look into some metric measures and a kitchen scale...

Yeah, that sounds like a plan...

Anyway, that'll do it for me today!

Happy Saint Patrick's Day, folks.

Stay safe, be well, and of course

Go Enjoy Something!
FC