In All Uncertain Terms

Ingredients per serving:

• 1 package of ramen, noodles only
• A cup-and-a-half-ish of chicken broth
• 3 glug-glug-glugs of soy sauce
• 1 clove of garlic, sliced or minced
• 1 green onion, sliced, whites and greens separated
• 2 good shakes of dried parsley
• 1 egg
• 1 sploosh of sesame oil
• 1/3 forkful of chili crisp

Directions

1. Bring the chicken broth and soy sauce to a gentle boil (in the range of 6-8 on my stove burners). Crack egg(s) into the liquid, and cook until whites are firm, but yolk is soft.
2. Use a spoon to remove the egg(s), and place it in the serving bowl. Toss the garlic and white part of the onion into the boiling liquid. Shake some parsley into the pot.
3. Place the noodles into the pot. Stir occasionally, until they are cooked to your liking.
4. Remove from heat. Dump into serving bowl.
5. Top with sploosh of sesame oil, green parts of the onion, and chili crisp.
6. Devour!

The Story

I prefer to cook without a recipe. Recipes slow me down, and the constant back-and-forth of moving between the stove, instructions, and ingredients feels clunky and burdensome. It can already be a chore to every day have to prepare food to sustain myself (and my family), especially if I want that food to taste good. So the experience is best if the counter-stove-plate-mouth circuit moves like a well-oiled machine.

There are other drawbacks to using recipes, too. Cookbooks take up space, which in my tiny rental kitchen, is a rare and precious commodity. They also get splattered with whatever you happen to be making, resulting in an unintentional scrapbook of samples from previous culinary adventures. Visit page 32 for Essence of Chicken Piccata, or page 55 for Deconstructed Chocolate Chip Cookie. Who wouldn’t want a book infused with mystery grease and crusted with egg?

Alternatively, online recipes (the “free” ones, at least) have a debut novella preceding any useful information, 47 trillion pop-up ads, and a minefield of affiliate links to accidentally click, that way you can be sure to purchase the author’s very favorite brand of flour. Don’t even think about trying to make this classic spaghetti without reading about the blogger’s friend’s great aunt’s visit to New York City, from which the Facebook pictures inspired the author to create a truly authentic traditional family recipe, so that you, too, can experience the taste of Italy. Also, the website will crash roughly twelve times while you are cooking. If you do manage to make it through the whole recipe, your phone or computer will forever have a tab playing audio, which you can’t quite seem to figure out how to close. Also, there’s tomato sauce in your keyboard, and your battery is at 2%. I can’t do anything to prevent the sauce-infused, nearly-dead laptop experience, but I can offer a recipe without ads, and for which reading my autobiography is not a prerequisite.

Ramen has a reputation for being the fuel of broke college kids. At about $4 for a 12-pack where I live, it makes sense. However, just because it’s cheap, it doesn’t have to be bad. Ditch the flavoring packet, and swap it for some other (also cheap!) replacements, and you’ve got a tastier, more nutritious meal.

This recipe is made with ingredients I almost always have on hand in my home. However, it’s meant to be flexible. If you don’t have chicken broth (or any broth), water will do. It might turn out slightly less flavorful, but still good. I’ve made it with teriyaki sauce instead of soy. If you don’t have fresh garlic, use powdered. If I’m out of chili crisp, I’ll add some crushed red pepper. If you don’t like spicy things, skip it entirely. Have a small amount of leftover chicken? Chop it up, and toss it in.

It’s also meant to be easy. I find cooking this ramen as described above easy enough, but if you’re really feeling lazy, you can toss everything into the pot at the same time. Your egg will probably be more hard than I prefer, and your chili crisp and green onions will no longer be crunchy, but it will still taste good. You lose texture, but save a small amount of time and effort.

Finally, it’s meant to be scalable and waste-less. It’s annoying when there is a recipe that makes 6 servings, but you want to make it for just yourself, and some of the ingredients can’t easily be divided. (For example, it calls for one egg, or one can of corn.) That’s why the measurements for this recipe are given in “per serving” increments; you can make as much or as little as you’d like. You also aren’t left with part of something that will go bad before you use the rest. A pet peeve of mine is when a recipe calls for a tablespoon of tomato paste, so I cover the can and put the remainder in the fridge, hoping I will use the rest in another dish, only to decide weeks later that it has probably sat there for too long to be good anymore, and I should throw it away.

This ramen recipe is nothing fancy, and it’s not an exact science, but it is easy, cheap, not horrible-for-you, and it tastes good. That’s my ideal type of food.