Survival Sunday 248: Butter Spaghetti from Japan?

In Which I Make Japanese Spaghetti... For A Third Time.

Now, I've made these kinds of fusion dishes before from Umai Crate, and there's always a hint of trepidation. Sometimes you'll get tasty bolognese, sometimes you'll get weird watery konjac noodles. Thankfully, this week's attempt was some tasty soy and butter spaghetti!

But of course, I couldn't just have the spaghetti, so I decided to use some leftover steak we had in our fridge and do my best to follow the instructions.

I melted about a tablespoon of butter in a frying pan and fried up the slices of steak.

A few things to note about cooking with butter:

• Butter can and will snap and pop at you, so if you're like me and a wimp about these things, clear the kitchen of other people first. Then you can't be a jerk to them when you burn yourself.
• Butter can and will get grease stains all over your shirt when you inevitably burn yourself.
• Butter burns fast, so keep an eye on that pan!
• Butter is freaking delicious.

With the meat heating through, I took the ingredients out of their package and took a look at what I was working with.

I was a bit nervous about this spaghetti, since it was so bloated-looking. I was afraid it would be too soft.
It was not!

The package for the Butter and Soy Sauce Spaghetti!

The instructions on the back of the package were in Japanese, but luckily, Umai Crate came through for us and had their own instructions in their pamphlet.

It said to just... dump the noodles in? Actually, it said to dissolve the noodles in the pan.
I figured that meant "detangle" rather than "melt into oblivion"...

And thankfully, they detangled pretty well!

Once my noodles were separated and mingling with the steak in the pan, I added a couple tablespoons of water to help loosen up both the pasta and the oncoming sauce!

Sadly, everything moved way too fast at this point and I got no pics of the sauce going in, but it was thick and rich and smelled really good. It was butter and soy sauce. Of course it smelled good.

It smelled and tasted so good that I literally couldn't get a picture without my burned hand shaking lol.

Now, as a side note, the steak had been stored with some leftover rice, so we reheated that and added some tasty shiso furikake we'd also received from Umai Crate.

Which was also very tasty!

So how did the spaghetti taste?

The Butter and Soy Sauce Spaghetti tasted like heaven. Warm and buttery with that umami soy sauce undertone, it was a gloriously mellow experience. If I'd remembered to add some black pepper, it might have been even better, but utterly unseasoned (aside from the steak), it was still fantastic. The steak paired perfectly with the noodles, so it was overall a very good experience. I'd pay for that in a restaurant.

It was so good that I'm planning to look up a recipe for Soy Sauce and Butter spaghetti to make at home...

How about the furikake and rice?

Well, the rice was your standard grocery store rice that had been cooked several days prior and left to sit in the fridge. Once reheated (and with a bit of steak juice soaked in from the storage), it was pleasant on its own. I should mention that it's my mother's habit to add butter to a pot of rice as it steams and cools on the stovetop, so there was butter in this, too. The salty butter flavor was perfect with the herbal, ume plum-hinted flavor of this furikake, and it was fun to watch the white rice slowly get stained magenta.

If you ever see that particular kind of spaghetti in an Asian Market, absolutely pick it up! And, uh, if you accidentally buy too much, feel free to send one my way ;)

Go Enjoy Something!
FC