MRSA: Make Ramen Sexy Again! (Part one)

Sunday, August 11th, 2024, 18:52

Mood: Full

Have I updated my site in the last four weeks? Nope, no I haven't. Welcome to life in higher education. For about a month before and two weeks after the start of a new school year, you get totally destroyed. Course registrations, syllabi, screaming, crying, frowing up. You know the drill.

But anyway, I've been watching a lot of YouTube videos these days about "ramen hacks", i.e. cheap and easy ways you can take a packet instant ramen meal and elevate it into something of actual nutritional value (kinda) and substance. For a busy mom on the go with an incredibly sedentary job that somehow still manages to exhaust me every mid-July through mid-August, if I can find something cheap and easy to put on the table, I'm for it. The problem is that there is a dearth of overlap content between these two categories: vegan ramen recipes, and cheap ramen recipes. There is a stereotype that vegan food is necessarily expensive, devoid of flavor, and insufferably good for you. Where are vegans supposed to turn to when they long for cheap shit?

I set a challenge for myself: create easy, cheap, and relatively nutritious instant ramen recipes that make full meals at $3 or less per serving. These recipes would need to be extremely delicious (duh) and still retain some of that junk food-ish novelty that comes from eating instant ramen. Even though I myself am vegetarian--an ovo-vegetarian, to be exact; one who eats eggs and plants only--I also wanted to make sure these recipes were vegan, specifically, because a lot of the most popular ramen hacks leave vegans totally up Shin's creek. (Egg and kewpie mayo broth, I'm looking squarely the fuck at you.) Finally, the ingredients needed to be accessible to those of us who live in less-than-worldly regions; we're talking big chain groceries primarily, with some use of online shopping.

For these recipes, I will create a separate recipe page for the ingredients, preparation, and nutritional value, but here I will describe their cost and taste. Let's go!

Chinese sichuan ramen

This bowl of ramen accomplishes two things. One, it is ridiculously easy to prepare, so it works perfect on days when you just can't be bothered--I made mine after a work shift from home with a migraine--and, two, it has a taste and mouthfeel reminiscent of Chinese hotpot.

At $2.27 per serving, it's actually the cheapest meal per-serving I've made yet. However, this is not thanks to its ingredients being budget-friendly. Although it utilizes soy sauce flavored Top Ramen, prepared as usual, it is elevated simply with Ramen Bae's veggie mix and Fly By Jing's chili crisp. The veggie mix ships free to any US state, but the chili crisp is a bit more expensive if it can't be sourced locally. Fortunately for me, I was able to find the chili crisp at my local Walmart, and I've seen shoppers in other smaller communities find it at their Walmarts too. If you were to purchase the ramen and chili crisp at my local Meijer, and the veggie mix from the Ramen Bae website, you'd pay an unfortunate $39.47 for the ingredients. It's worth noting, though, that you'd have enough Ramen Bae and chili crisp for 20 bowls of ramen; simply buy another two packs of Top Ramen and you've got lunch for over half the month.

Another cool thing about this one is that you can really cater the recipe to your tastes simply by picking a different chili crisp to go in it. I personally favor the Xtra Spicy Chili Crisp, as I've tried the others and they just aren't hot enough for me, but Sichuan Chili Crisp might be good for someone who orders "medium" or "hot" at the Chinese restaurant and then says "Wow, Derek, that's actually hotter than I expected" or something. Those two both taste great, just with different spice levels. And then I can't speak to the others in this product line, because I haven't tried them, but I don't doubt their quality.

All in all, I give this meal a 7 out of 10 packets! Is it the best? No, but it's just some crap I can throw into my rice cooker at work and set at my desk easily. And, let's face it, even besides having actual vegan options, Nissin beats Maruchan any day of the week when it comes to bottom-shelf instant noodles.

Korean BBQ ramen with tofu and mixed vegetables

My family loves a dish I make that we call "Korean BBQ tofu", which is pretty much an elevated version of Maangchi's banchan sweet and crunchy tofu (or dubu gangjeong). I naturally therefore had to bring The Brat and The Pat in the mix to try this ramen, and it was a major hit. Even The Country Brat, who has struggled with some mild arfid through her childhood and has been working on expanding her palate, announced that this ramen was now in her top five favorite foods we make here.

It is perhaps because the experience was so well-received by my family--or the fact that a food shop at my local Meijer for five servings of this would cost a total of $17.95, and you'd have one ramen packet and some condiments left over--that I characterize this ramen dish as a very family or group-centric recipe. It contains a small plate of stir fry veggies and super firm tofu--which, I might add for our young parents in the audience, can be purchased using WIC. I'll spare the macros for the recipe, and only for those who consent to seeing it, but let's say it's incredibly dense and filling, which The Country Pat enthusiastically pointed out several times. By the end of our meal, we were all so stuffed that it was hard to believe that I'd spent just $2.74 per serving to feed us. Another thing I really enjoyed about this meal was that it utilizes ketchup, which can be "obtained for free". (In fairness, I kinda cheated and used a couple tablespoons off a $1 bottle of jalapeno ketchup, but there's no reason you can't just use a packet from a restaurant.)

However, the thing I did not really enjoy was that, in between the gochujang and the ketchup, it has a more sweet than savory flavor profile, and I am generally a savory girl through and through. In the end, I will begrudgingly award this meal 7 out of 10 packets. In reality, it's more of a 5-6 packets meal for me, but there were just too many pros to give it so few packets. It's definitely the kind of meal I will be adding to our rotations when we're on the last vestiges of my bank account before payday, and my family loved it too much for me to really hate it--but let's just say that, if I were single and wealthier, I probably wouldn't make this too often. (Or I guess I could just use tomato sauce instead of ketchup.) I would absolutely recommend this, though, to any fan of Asian barbeques and sweeter, tomato-based flavor profiles.