Ramen For Dinner

I am thinking about deleting my Pinterest boards and starting over again. I know that this sounds crazy, because Pinterest is just a fancy way to collect ideas and store them.   I think half the fun of Pinterest is finding the new idea or trying the new recipe, but then I think about how I have almost 9K pins and I don't think I have actually used 1% of them.  Why should I look for more idea's if I am not using the idea's I already have pinned?  First world problems, I know. I am still on the fence as to if I should or shouldn't.

One of the things that I do like about Pinterest is that I can look at several recipes or ideas and then combine it together into something that I want. A perfect example of this is my ramen recipe.  I took the elements from  a Simple Sesame Noodles Recipe by The Pioneer Woman and bastardizing some elements from Half Baked Harvest's Crockpot Crispy Caramelized  Pork Ramen Noodle Soup w/Curry Roasted Acorn Squash  to come up with an easy ramen soup recipe that takes maybe 20 minutes to make and is now my go to recipe when I have no idea what I am making for dinner.
If all else fails for dinner, soup is always the answer.

I normally would try and have a picture of what ever I am talking about, but I can never seem to remember to take a picture before I have already started to devour it.  Instead here is a picture of the Dib Cat.  The internet needs more pictures of cats.

 My Ramen Recipe

1/2 C Soy Sauce
1 Tbs Hoisin Sauce
1/2 C Vegetable Oil
1 Tsp Chili Oil
2 Tsp Sesame Oil
2 Tbs RiceVinegar
1 Tbs Red Chili Sauce
1 Tbs Korean Hot Sauce or Rooster Sauce
1/2 Tsp Powdered Ginger
1/4 Tsp Fish Sauce
1 Tbs Minced Garlic

Mix all these things together and set to the side.  The oils may separate, that is okay, you can stir it back together.


In a Wok or frying pan on medium heat cook:
1/4 C Diced Onions
1/4 C Shredded or Diced Carrots
Hand full of shredded Cabbage
1 medium to small cubed pork chop
Splash of Soy sauce and oil to keep things from sticking
(You can add mushrooms, but my husband hates mushrooms, so I don't)

When this is done set it to the side. Cook your noodles. (I use Soba, but I am sure you can use other types. Noodles are just a vehicle to get soup from one place to another.)   Keep the water.  Divide noodles out into bowls. Add your meat and cooked veggies on to each pile of noodles.  Pour your sauce over your bowls of noodles.  Add some of the retained water to make it more soup like.

This is where I top each bowl with a fried egg and sprinkle it with sesame seed and some times spring onions if I have them.  I know it seems like a lot of steps, but really it is just throwing a bunch of stuff in bottles together to make the sauce and tossing it with what ever veggies I have on hand with noodles.  The fried egg is because ramen is always better with a fried egg on it,  much like hamburgers.   Enjoy!

What is that Popping Sound?

What is that popping sound? Please let that be the pickles.  Either that or the cats have gotten a hold of a cap gun.  I am trying to make a healthy stab at my cookbook, before I impulsively add more books to the list. It is canning season, or as some people call it, August.  Prior to this year, I have never tinned, jellied or jammed a single thing.  My mother is an accomplished jelly maker and I have been able to use her jalapeño jelly as a bargaining tool, but that accomplishment has not been passed down to me genetically.  This is the first year that I have ever been involved in adventure, and I think I am in love, or at least my taste buds are.

After making jellies with my mom and with Lizzy, I decide to see what Betty Crocker has to say on the matter of canning.  Picking one of the remaining Betty Crocker cookbooks by random, I found that the 1988 Edition had a simple to read, possibly won't burn myself recipe on making Garlic Dill Pickles. I also had about 8 cucumbers in the fridge that needed to be used. The cucumbers I am using are in no relation to the Sea Pig, which is also a cucumber. I don't think that Garlic Dill Sea Pig Pickles would be all that tasty.

The one blessing about Betty Crocker, whom I feel should just be referred to as Betty here on out, is that her instructions are simple. She assumes that every one is an idiot when it comes to cooking.  I like this, because sometimes I am an idiot when it comes to cooking.  I am aware of my talents enough to know that there is a lot that I don't know when it comes to the kitchen and that pressure cookers scare me.   Thankfully the Garlic Dill Pickles do not require a pressure cooker, and had reduced the possibility of me dying due to a dill pickle marginally.

In fact the Garlic Dill Pickles seem deceptively simple. Slice cucumbers, toss it in a jar with dill and garlic and a few slices of onion and pour a brine over it and process in a cauldron of boiling water.  When it is done processing, let  the jar sit until cool, and there should be a popping noise to signify that the jars are sealed. I have no idea if the pickles have actually turned out,  mostly because I need to let them set for 6 weeks before opening.  Once they are opened and tasted, it will become evident if I have created a killer cucumber.  Until that time, I am just going to assume that everything is normal and hope for the best.

Fine On The Side

 Bradley's Complete Gas Grill Cookbook looks scarier than in really is. I thought that this hard back book from 1982 was going to have dated and possibly some recipes that were going to make my husband cringe and me question my sanity, especially since the cover shows a family that is grilling way more food then the four of them were going to consume. I am trying to intermingle the scary cookbooks with the not so scary cookbooks, so I don't have a month and the end where I am writing about nothing but jello molds.   

It took me a while to figure out where we had acquired this cookbook, since it isn't in usual fair to purchase cookbooks prior to when I was born. After much soul searching and brain racking I figured it out, and figured out why I have this book that I have never cracked open until yesterday. My grandmother gave this cookbook to my husband for Christmas along with instruments of grilling destruction years ago. The cookbook when with the other cookbooks and the grill tools went to hang out with the grill for future use. 

The book survived the great and terrible purge of books, because it came from my grandmother. I don't talk to my grandmother all that often, mostly because the older I have gotten, the more we clash. I use to be much closer to my grandparents and it was really nice to be around them and to chat with them, but now it is just awkward.  I am not doing anything of interest for them and I am past the age of asking for advice and I have grown out of cute grand daughter stage a long time ago and married a boy who doesn't tuck in his shirt and has long hair.  We are people that hold different interests in life and we don't have a lot of common ground anymore. It is sad, but true. When there is something that can link us together even for a moment I hold on it, which is why I held onto this cookbook. 

The recipe that I chose was the Mushrooms On Skewer on page 110 in The Fine on the Side section of the book.   Basically it calls for mushrooms, butter and dried rosemary leaves with some pepper and chives. There was only one way that I could mess this recipe up, is if I stabbed myself with a kabob stick and bled all over the place. I had a little bit of fear that I would die because of a kabob stick puncturing a vein and my part vampire red head abilities would flair up causing me incredible bits of agony and a slow and terrible death like I had been staked in the heart, because after all a mini stake is still a stake and heart and hand start with the same letter, so there was a slim possibility of death. With this in mind I  added was a little bit of garlic powder, because I am convinced that everything is better with garlic and if I am going to die by being skewered by a stake, then might as well add garlic to that burn. I fortunately did not stab myself and die by skewer and have lived to cook another day.   

I made four skewers of the mushrooms and then decided that I would really like some bacon with my mushrooms and the rest of the skewers got wrapped in bacon, because who doesn't want more bacon in their life and grilled bacon and mushrooms sounds like an awesome pizza selection to me.  Mostly because I am a grilling champion and because I had a glass of wine in me to keep me from fussing with the mushrooms every five seconds like I normally would,  everything turned out well. The tasted good, but didn't knock my socks off the way that balsamic vinaigrette mushrooms do. The smoke and the rosemary was a good combo that was pleasing to the taste buds. 

Will I use this recipe again? Probably not, but I am willing to try other recipes out of this long forgotten cookbook.  There were actually quite of few off beat recipes that sounded good and look relatively simple to make. There were also a few other recipes that might require me to learn how to butcher a pig if I ever want to get the exact right cut of meat.  At this point I am going to forgo the butchering and stick to the simple.  I now have completed 2 cookbooks out of 57 for those that are keeping score on this cooking challenge.