If you are Asian, you know exactly what I’m talking about.  The big bowl of steaming liquid, little wire mesh spoons to cook your food with, eating a bunch of vegetables at the end and die to the amount of spices.  I wish I had some better pictures from the restaurant, but I don’t.  This post however, is not about hot pot, not really.  It’s about what to do with all that leftover you got because the hot pot is intended to feed 4, and you went there with 2 because you just had to have it.

We came home with a metric ton of raw fish, beef, chicken, pork meatballs, fried tofu, egg noodles, and spinach.  It was like going to the grocery store.  I suppose I could have had them pack up the hot pot broth, and used a bit of it in this ramen, but I didn’t think that far ahead.  You can of course make this ramen without having hot pot the night before, but that’s just not as fun now is it?

Evie’s Ramen #154

Ingredients:

• 5 slices of beef
• 5 slices of chicken
• 5 slices of fish
• 5 shrimp, cleaned and deveined
• 2 pork balls
• 2 pieces of fried tofu
• 1 cup cooked thin egg noodles
• 1/2 cup spinach
• 2 cups beef broth
• 1/2 tablespoon veal demi glace
• salt to taste

Directions:

1. Heat a pot of water over your stove for boiling the protein.
2. In a second pot, bring the beef broth to a boil and add the veal demi glace for extra flavoring.  Add the pork balls and let boil for about 2 minutes.  Then add the egg noodles and spinach and boil for an additional 3 minutes.
3. In the first pot of water, boil the beef, chicken, fish, and shrimp for 3 minutes.  Do this in a separate pot because we don’t want the nasties from boiling meat and fish to be in the ramen.  Turn off the heat and skim off the nasties from the top and discard.
4. In a large bowl, add the broth and noodle mixture.  Top with the drained protein.  Serve and enjoy!

After making this, believe it or not, I still had a bunch of leftovers but it was mostly the chicken and spinach.  I made a quick stir fry dish with the chicken, a whole onion, black bean sauce, and the spinach.  Totally delicious, but no pictures sorry.

Do you have:

• A package of Ramen? (Or noodles and stock)
• Tomatoes?
• Bacon?
• Eggs?
• Frozen Peas?

If you have 3 or more of the above, you can make this kicked up ramen.  I make this one, all the time, because I usually have all these ingredients in my kitchen.  This looks pretty delicious right, you’re probably wondering, why would you throw that up!  Well, it wasn’t voluntary.  So a few days ago, a coworker of mine convinced me to start the Beachbody Insanity workout.  It was Sunday night, and I figured why not, I’m motivated from watching the Olympics all week, lets do this!  So I made dinner [this ramen], I ate it, omnomnom, while watching the USA vs Canada Hockey game [GO USA!].  About an hour later, the game is over, we kicked some Canuk ass, and I felt so great, lets start Insanity!!!  Well… I highly underestimated this workout routine.  Let me list my follies:

1. Eating a pretty big dinner.
2. Working out 1 hour after eating a pretty big dinner.
3. Did not read the warning labels and PDFs that came with Insanity – who reads manuals?
4. Extreme OCD at times.
5. Assuming this workout video is similar to other workout videos – in that you are suppose to follow along.
6. Assuming that the little Asian girl is the weaker out of the two people demonstrating with the trainer.  The other is a dude, with muscles.
7. Participated in a 3 month long program to keep my couch from flying into outer space (i.e. I sat on it, for a long time.)

I am sure there are more follies, but that’s not the point to this story.  I started the video, got through a pretty rough warm up, tried to follow the little Asian girl through out all the sets.  At the 4th set of workouts, I totally realized that she’s what you would call… HARDCORE.  She was kicking the dude’s ass, I’m pretty sure she’s a robot.  At this point I’m already half way in, I figured I can just power through it with what energy I have left.  At the end, I had a little bit of a second wind and went a little crazy with the plank leg raises… Right when we started the cooldown stretching, I suddenly felt a little woozy and started seeing stars.  I sat down, put my head between my legs, and hoped it would go away.  NOPE, not when I just ate nommy ramen 1.5 hours ago.  I threw it all up.  I worked out so hard that I threw up.  If you think about it, that’s pretty HARDCORE isn’t it?  So maybe, I did beat the little Asian chick on the video…. (ok no not really.)

The joke is on me tho, apparently this video, if I had read the manual, is a fitness test.  You are suppose to do only as much as you can do, and you were NOT suppose to follow along.  Throughout this entire video series, you are suppose to rest when you need to rest, because they call it INSANITY for a reason.  This is what I get for not reading the manual.  Just remember kids, read the manual if you don’t want to throw up like I did.  The only regret that I have is throwing up precious bacon.  :(

Evie’s Everyday Ramen

Directions:

1. Take 1 or 2 slices of bacon and cut it into 1/2 inch pieces.  Cook bacon in a small stock pot until it’s to your favorite bacon consistency.  (I prefer a softer chewey bacon myself).  Drain the bacon grease.
2. Take a tomato and cut it into about 8 pieces.  Add the tomatoes directly to the bacon over high heat, it will sizzle, cook down the tomatoes until they are tender and there are tomato juices on your bacon.
3. Carefully add 2 – 3 cups of water to the pot.   Let it boil, and add the spice packet.  [If you are using noodles and stock, add 2-3 cups of stock instead.]
4. Add your noodles and frozen peas.  Let it boil for a few minutes to tenderize your noodles.  No more than 2 or 3 minutes should be needed for most ramen.
5. Meanwhile, crack open an egg and whisk it.  At the end when the noodles are soft and ready to eat, drizzle the egg mixture into the pot.  This is how you make egg drop soup!  Turn off your burner right away, we want the egg to be light and fluffy, don’t boil it.  It will cook the second it reaches the boiling water.
6. Top ramen with fried shallots and drizzles of sesame oil and serve!

I love my ramen noodle!  It doesn’t get any easier than just throwing a bunch of stuff in a pot and add some noodles.  Here is what I did for this bowl, and I’ll share my deep dark secret with you on how I flavor the broth.

Evie’s Ramen #131

Ingredients:

• 1 bunch of soba noodles
• a handful of enoki mushrooms, cleaned
• 3 baby napa cabbage
• 1 medium carrot
• a few slices of Asian BBQ
• 1 egg
• 2 tsp beef broth
• 1 tsp veal demi glaze
• cilantro for ganish

Directions:

1. Cut your carrots into pretty flower shapes!  Very optional, you can just slice them, but I had some extra time and making carrot flowers is fun.  I first cut my carrot into a 2 inch section, make sure the bottom and top are flat as can be so the carrot sits up completely straight.  Then I cut V-shaped sections all the way down the length of the carrot.  This might take a little practice to perfect.  After you’ve cut about 5 or 6 Vs all around the perimeter, making sure they are evenly spaced, turn the carrot sideways and cut them into slices.
2. Boil 3 cups of water, add the beef broth and veal demi glaze.  This is my secret ingredient as of lately, it’s super flavorful in any broth!  I purchased mine pre-packaged but you can also make your own, it just takes about oh 50000 hours.
3. Meanwhile in another pot, boil 4 cups of water, this is your blanching water.  Add the carrots, baby napa, and mushrooms.  Blanch everything for about 2 minutes or however long to get your desired texture (you might like a crunchier vegetable for example).    Drain and set aside.
4. Poach an egg using the blanching water, or if you prefer poaching it in a pan you can do that as well.
5. To the beef broth, add the BBQ, they only need about a minute to warm up.   Fish the BBQ out and set aside.  We cook the BBQ in the flavored broth as opposed to the blanching water because we want to keep the meaty flavor.  If you don’t have any Asian BBQ, you can substitute fried thick-sliced bacon.
6. Add the soba noodles to the beef broth.  Follow the directions on your package, but typically the thin kind takes about 2-3 minutes to cook.
7. Assemble all your ingredients!  First using a pasta spoon, grab all the noodles out of the broth and place in a bowl.  Then arrange the vegetables, egg, and meat over top.  Last, pour the broth over everything but make sure it doesn’t drown, then garnish with cilantro.  We pour the broth last to warm the vegetables up again if they got cold, and add a little flavor to them before eating.

And there you have it, another pretty bowl of ramen.  I think if there was a most-ramen-eaten-by-a-single-person award category, I would probably win it.