I’m not a chef.
In a sense, I wouldn’t even consider myself a home cook. The space known as the kitchen is a foreign language to me and I’ve avoided it for as long as I can remember. I’ve cooked things in the past and they turned out ok. I would never have shared those previous experiments with other because frankly, I had no idea of what I was really doing in the kitchen.
Towards the end of my weight loss journey, I started to become interested in food. Not the consumption of it but the art and science of cooking. The things that made food not only taste good but also look good. The fascination started with TV shows like Top Chef , David Chang’s The Mind of A Chef and Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations.
For past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading David Chang’s food quarterly magazine, Lucky Peach, and the first issue was all about ramen. I want to try to make a ramen soup from what I read in the magazine.
So, I looked up a few recipes online to see what I needed to make a ramen noodle soup. For this recipe, I substituted Udon noodles for Ramen noodles purely for the lower sodium content. The following recipe is what I came up from a mix of different recipes that I found online:
- 32 oz Low Sodium Chicken Stock
- 1 cup of water
- 1 tbsp of miso (can be found in Asian section of grocery store)
- 2 tbsp of low sodium soy sauce
- 2 tbsp of mirin (can be found in Asian section of grocery store)
- ½ tsp of garlic powder
- ¼ tsp of onion powder
- 6 oz of chicken (more or less can be used depending on your preference)
- 4 oz of ramen noodles (more or less can be used depending on your preference)
- 1 cup of egg white (or 4 hard boiled eggs) (optional)
- Cook chicken in pan until done and set to the side for later use.
- Combine the chicken stock and water into a large saucepan, cover with a lid and bring to a boil.
- Once stock comes to a boil, add miso, soy sauce, mirin, garlic powder, and onion powder to saucepan and mix together.
- Once your broth mixture is complete, add the noodles to your broth and cook them according to the package’s directions. (I used Udon noodles for lower sodium content.)
- Add cooked chicken to broth while noodles are cooking.
- Pour completed mixture in 4 bowls and serve
- (Optional) Top with a halved hard-boiled egg (I stirred in egg whites for extra protein while the broth was still cooking on the stove.)
Overall, this dish turned out well. I’ll definitely have to make it again for Angela in the future. I may be on my way to become a part time cook after all!
