Here is the average college student’s well-rounded diet: microwavable frozen foods, canned foods, pizza, beer, and boilable starches which include but are not exclusive to: spaghetti, Rice-A-Roni, and Ramen Noodles. There are sub-categories which include toastable foods like Eggo Waffles, Pop Tarts, and Bagel Bites. There is also what I like to call the “lazy” category of foods. For example, the “lazy grilled cheese” is toasting a piece of bread and then eating it with a slice of cold American cheese. The “lazy Eggo waffle” is when I don’t want to dirty a plate so I painstakingly fill all the waffle squares with syrup and eat it with my hands. My favorite is the “lazy chicken parmesan” which is when I microwave a bunch of vegetarian chicken nuggets and toss them in a pot of spaghetti with Ragu. And, finally, there’s the occasional “lazy breakfast” catered by Anheiser-Busch.
These dietary standards are primarily applicable to students living off-campus without a meal-plan, and are further applicable to someone like me who once scorched her hair while heating soup on the stove. That was back when I had long hair. Did you know that burnt human hair smells oddly like burnt yak hair? No? Obviously you haven’t set enough yaks on fire. Since my hair is short now, to set it on fire would require me to fall asleep on the burner.just wait until finals week. Just you wait.
Ramen Noodles have been my warm, economical friend for quite some time, and I have reason to believe that it is one of the world’s most perfect processed foods. Ramen Noodles are packaged in geometrically sound Noodle Bricks. Their shape is second only to the arch in architectural design and aesthetic. In an emergency, you could build some sort of crude shelter out of these bricks, and when it rains and then gets really hot, you could eat your shelter. Second, Ramen is frightfully inexpensive. Schnucks will occasionally sell packages of Ramen at 5 for one dollar. That is twenty cents for one package. Washington University tuition is $26,900 per year; if you spent a year’s tuition on Ramen, you could buy 134,500 packages of Ramen. This would be enough Ramen to build the Versailles of Ramen Noodles. Since you are sleeping through Orgo anyway, why not drop-out of school and aspire to architectural greatness? Third, Ramen is a great source of vegetables if you consider those little green flecks in the broth powder vegetables. Fourth, the excessive sodium content in that astronaut package of broth powder is the food industry’s way of saying that you should be drinking more water anyway.
For such a simple food, there are quite a few different ways to prepare Ramen. Do you break the brick into quarters? In half? Do you boil the brick whole against all rational judgment? If you are in a dorm, I understand that you’re basically getting by on “hot pot Ramen,” which is essentially boiling water and dumping it in a bowl with the Ramen noodles and letting it sit. Even though we have a perfectly functional stove at our apartment, this is the way my roommate Laura still prepares her Ramen, but I don’t tell her outright that she is preparing her Ramen incorrectly. I also don’t tell her when I knock her toothbrush into the toilet.
Chainsaw Calligraphy recommends that you boil the living hell out of a brick of Ramen Noodles broken into four pieces. Boil it until it screams. I sometimes leave my Ramen boiling on the stove for a quality fifteen minutes. At some point during the cooking process, a portal to another dimension will open and out will come a voice who will warn you that you are cooking your Ramen for too long. Ignore this portal, no matter how exciting it looks, and continue boiling. This excessive cooking time insures maximum water intake of the noodles, and in a symbiotic return, the noodles enhance the future broth-water with starchy goodness. Once this has been completed, add the atomic broth powder, stir, and enjoy.
Cooking Ramen Noodles properly is quite an art and requires some mad skills. Look for my new series on Food Network called “The Naked Ramen Chef.” I believe I have enough material to make it to the first commercial break.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 29th, 2002 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Cadenza. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.