Miso ramen

Haven’t made ramen at home for a while. I think this was the last time I did, two years ago. I made my own dashi, which necessitated buying some kombu and bonito flakes at the Asian supermarket, but you can also buy instant dashi, which works just fine. This was miso ramen, so in addition to dashi, you need red miso paste. You also need some stock in addition to the dashi. I used Rachael Ray vegetable stock. Most ramen places we go to use their own pork stock made from scratch, but while homemade dashi only takes a few minutes, homemade pork stock takes hours and hours. It is on my list of cooking projects to do someday, just not that day. We had fresh ramen noodles on hand at the time, so we didn’t have to buy them at the H-Mart. If you don’t have a readily available Asian grocery, Amazon sells just about everything you might need for this, as does Umamicart.com. The other fresh ingredients all came from our regular supermarket.

Between instant dashi and boxed stock, you can make up ramen broth very quickly, so it’s totally do-able as a weeknight meal. The dried ramen you get on the cheap at the grocery store is an acceptable alternative if fresh ramen is hard to come by. Just cook it in some plain boiling water and add it to the broth. The rest of this bowl was some chopped fresh spinach, some frozen corn that I briefly microwaved, a 6-minute soft-boiled egg, and some enoki mushrooms.