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

Survival Sunday 232: Steak and Shake Connection

In which I make Noodles with steak and also make a milkshake!

My mom made steak, which, I may have mentioned, usually means she made too much steak for just her and my father. The leftover steak sat in the fridge for a few days before I finally asked if I could put it out of its misery, and once I was given the go-ahead, I got ready to put it in some noodz!

The Noodz

The Steak!

Some Eggs!

These Noodles came from our August Umai Crate!

Healthy Vegetable Ramen?
Better add some steak.

If you know me, then you probably know I have a somewhat rude and subversive sense of humor. One of my favorite things to do is taking a healthy option and making it as unhealthy as possible - hence adding steak to "healthy" veggie ramen!

Here we see the steak all cut up into strips and soaking in an egg bath

To make this at home, you will need:

• Leftover protein
• Ramen
• Eggs
• Spices and/or onion or garlic powder to taste

Cut the protein into manageable pieces, then crack the eggs into a bowl and scramble them up. Once the eggs are a mostly uniform yolk-color, add your protein and let it soak.

This is also when you add any herbs/spices/powders you'd like.
I believe this is garlic and/or onion powder.

 Next, you're going to want to assemble the ramen packet(s). I set the brick right in the bowl to hold it, but you don't have to. Basically, you just want to be sure what you have to work with!

The contents of the ramen pack

The Noodz

The seasoning packet

The unmarked and somewhat intimidating packet of ?

Cook your ramen according to the package. Since our package was in Japanese, I used Google Translate, and it was well worth it. The cooking instructions were hilariously dire - "Stop fire when strings become untied".

The strings are not yet untied.

Untied noodz with the steak and eggs added in!

If you're curious as to how I kept things from burning on in the pot, I actually floated the steak chunks on top of the brick before things softened up! That way, the fat started to render out of the steak (what fat was left, at least) and into the noodles, the egg bloomed into the broth, and the overall effect was delightfully easy to clean up after the fact!

Once I'd "stopped the fire" (turned off the heat and moved the pot to a cool burner),
I added the broth packet, which smelled delightful and looked really good!

Now came the moment of truth, however - what was in the unmarked packet?!

Oh. It's veggies. The kind you get in Yakisoba.
Sweet!

This meal did not last that long! We got it to the table and it was devoured in mere minutes. Honestly, there is no nobler fate for leftovers than to be cooked up with ramen. The steak had gotten tough in the fridge, but after soaking in egg and simmering with noodles for a while, it softened right up and became just as tender as when it was first cooked! The egg bath is quickly becoming my go-to trick for working with leftover meats.

Now, if you're going to have hot noodles in the summer time, you're probably going to want something to cool yourself off with, right? Of course you are! So please enjoy this week's video:

Hopefully, you all enjoy noodles and sweets in the days to come.

Go Enjoy Something!
FC