Before things get too crazy, I believe introductions are in order. I’m a 30-something guy living in Baltimore who started cooking for real mainly to impress girls. (Fellas – remember not to set the bar too high on the first meal!) The neighborhood I live in has only one small grocery store within easy walking distance and I don’t own a car. Plus, I’m pretty lazy. Consequently, I often have to make do with a painfully limited selection of items for my culinary adventures. On the plus side, this lack of choice forces a bit of creativity to stave off boredom and/or full blown Five Guys addiction. By no means do I think of myself a master chef, I routinely “discover” basic herbs like they were the dead sea scrolls and use them with reckless abandon for weeks at a time, but I’ve made some things that I am pretty proud of, and I am always learning. Of course, I would like to use nothing but the freshest and highest quality ingredients, but due to the aforementioned lack of options and laziness, plus an occasional bout of penny-pinching, I sometimes cut a corner or two.

Henry has graciously allowed me to post chronicles of my triumphs and failures in the kitchen. I would have liked to present these feats as normal recipes with a nice bulleted list of ingredients and such, but unfortunately, I am terrible with measurements because I never use them. I season and cook by eye and by feel, so any attempt by me to assign units of measurement to anything that I’ve made would most likely end up in disaster. Also, I usually drink when I cook, so I can never remember exactly how much of what I put into any given dish. Every meal is an adventure!

One day at work, where these things usually happen, I decided out of the blue that I was going to attempt some sort of pasta bake with my brand new Pyrex baking dish. I did a little research online to get the general idea of the standard cooking times, techniques, ingredients, etc., and stopped by the store on my way home.

Foolishly eschewing a list, and thereby almost certainly guaranteeing that I would forget something important, I gathered my ingredients with well-honed market-ninja skills. In no particular order, I picked up a medium yellow onion, a large green pepper, garlic, a large can of crushed tomatoes, sausage, and cheese. The idea had previously occurred to me to put one layer of sausage and one layer of pepperoni in the pasta bake, but all such thoughts were washed away when I saw the package of prosciutto ham glowing among its lesser deli meat brethren. That’s right, shit was about to get fancy! Everything else I needed I already had at home.

After some liquid courage to get me through this daunting new cooking challenge, I prepped everything that needed chopping, preheated the oven to 350 degrees, set a large skillet to medium heat, and put a pot of salted water on to boil.

First step was to brown up the sausage in the skillet. My local Italian sausage options are limited, so I ended up using a classic orange tube of Eskay pork sausage. I picked up the hot variety, partially because I always like a little kick, but mostly because I am always working to covertly build up my girlfriend’s tolerance for spicy foods. When the sausage was just browned, out went the fat into the special “sausage/bacon grease that I’ll probably never use for anything because there are little sausage bits in it and that is gross” coffee can that I keep in the fridge.

Next to join the sausage in the pan was the can of crushed tomatoes, about half a cup of olive oil, five or so cloves of minced garlic, the whole diced onion, half the diced green pepper, salt, pepper, Italian seasoning (oregano and thyme), sugar (just a shake), and red pepper flakes (amount depending on desired spiciness level). I let this simmer at medium heat, occasionally stirring and tasting, and adding more of this or that as necessary while I prepared the pasta.

I used whatever pasta I had at home, which happened to be egg noodles and thin spaghetti. It was kind of a weird combination for something like this, but they did the job. While the sauce and meat mixture simmered, I cooked the noodles per the instructions. The spaghetti took a little longer for al dente so it went in first.

When the pasta was ready, the tomato and sausage mixture had been simmering for about 20 minutes. Ideally, I would have liked to let it cook out for much longer, like I would if I was making spaghetti sauce, but I was getting pretty goddam hungry. I spread the cooked pasta on the bottom of the baking dish as the first layer. In retrospect, I should have mixed the pasta and sauce mix together before adding both to the pan. Instead, I added the sauce mix over the noodle layer. Unfortunately, this created patches of dried up noodles on the bottom where the sauce didn’t settle through during baking.

With the base layers down, next came a layer of cheese. I used the Sargento Italian Cheese Blend, which consists of shredded mozzarella, provolone, asiago, romano, fontina, and parmesan. It took almost the whole package to cover the entire dish.

Next up: the big guns! I can’t attest to the quality of the prosciutto brand that I used because I am far from a connoisseur, but I thought it was quite tasty. The lovely strips of meat went on top of the cheese layer as shown below.

Finally, I covered the prosciutto with the rest of the cheese and a sprinkling of Italian-style bread crumbs, just because it seemed like the right thing to do.

To cover or not to cover? I couldn’t find a majority consensus online. This quickly proved to be a moot point because I discovered that my list-snubbing ways had caused me to forget the aluminum foil. The matter settled, I popped the whole thing into the over for about 20 minutes. When it was ready, the top was nicely brown and the cheese was bubbling.

The results? Not too shabby! I was pretty happy with how it turned out, and there were no complaints from the little lady. Good thing, because I made enough to live on for a week. Thanks to my lack of foil, I had to cram the leftovers into multiple square Gladware containers.

How it could have been better: I thought the sauce was a little bland. This I attribute to the short cooking time before I added it to the bake. Also, I would have liked the sauce to be a little saucier, I may need to add more liquid next time. Finally, more meat! That tube of sausage was stretched a little thin when spread around the whole dish. Maybe that additional layer of pepperoni shouldn’t have been omitted after all….

I definitely considered this dish a success for a first try. Next time, allotting more time for the sauce, adding a bit more substance, and using a more traditional pasta should really smooth out the rough edges. Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

First up we have Myojo Chukazanmai, which I’ve had little luck translating, but “chuka” means Chinese…anyway, the flavor I tried is “soy sauce with chili oil pack”, which is more aiming for a basic Chinese-style broth. They’re also available in more Japan-style flavors like miso. I originally thought they were a Japanese product, but now I hear tell they are actually made in Singapore. Hmmm. I will investigate. Ratings are on a 5 scale:

Price: $1.69
Flavor: 4
Texture: 4.5
Spicy: 0
Extras: Oil/Soy Sauce packet

The noodles are non-fried, and thus they’re very hard and compact. This flavor comes with one packet of powdered soup base, and one pack of liquid flavoring:

The fat content and heart-stopping sodium content is most likely from the liquid flavoring, which is a mixture of spicy oil and salty sauce. Omitting or using very little of the stuff should help cut back on these two baddies some:

The ingredient list, as is the norm for instant noodles, ain’t a pretty sight:

You can see that the noodles, having been boiled in plain water, exude very little oil:

One thing about these particular noodles are that thet aren’t actualy crinkly, rather they achieve erstz squiggle but simply denting them, the cheap bastards:

But the noodles have excellent texture, resilient, springy, sligtly chewy…. And the broth is clear with a clean soy sauce, ginger and pork flavor, with a strong perfume of sweetness, rice wine, and five spice. Smells like char siu, or yakibuta in Japanese, which is that reddish Chinese roasted pork. It’s a commonly used topping for Japanese ramen.

This is the liquid soup base – the oil is slightly spicy, and the black stuff is unbelievably salty. Adding some does improve the flavor, but not more than a few drops before it gets way too oily/salty:

Here’s an example of how you might prepare a bowl for a quick meal. It’s topped with some sliced brisket, an egg I fried and sliced, scallions, and sliced mushrooms. In the end, as close to real ramen as I’ve gotten in an instant noodle. Really, really good:

Oh poor poor instant ramen! It’s shocking that so many people have no concept of how broad of a variety exists, and the enormous meal potential that resides within each humble little pack. It suffers a stigma in the US, in the inintiated’s mind mainly the domain of indigent college students. I must admit that even many of my very own friends know only of Top or Cup o Noodles (which are in fact made by Nissin, the company that marketed the original instant ramen invented by the late Momofuku Ando). Yes these particular friends are non-Asian, but seriously people it’s 200 freakin 9 already! Get to know ramen.

The range of flavors (and quality)  is truly awesome, and with just a few tweaks, a sub one dollar portion of food can be made into a fine repast for two. With some additional time and effort investment the horrifyingly unhealthy aspects can even be somehwat mitigated. In the next several days, I’ll be posting detailed reviews about some more interesting brands, stuff I couldn’t fit into my Citypaper article this week, which includes a general overview and some buying/cooking tips.