Homemade Ramen

I have a love-hate relationship with cooking, and having a miniature kitchen with virtually no counter space has only strengthened that relationship. But I recently felt inspired to try my hand at cooking again outside of the realm of pasta and frozen pizza.

I had been craving ramen. Not your college cup-of-noodle ramen but the real deal. I've only had real ramen once during Head of the Charles weekend last year in Boston so I would not consider myself an expert on the topic and wasn't sure what to look for in recipes. A lot of the recipes I came across seemed really involved, using a lot of ingredients I'd likely never use again and I hate that.

I finally stumbled across a recipe on my new favorite site for recipes, Damn Delicious. I really like this site because all of the recipes are unique but easy to make. I've so far made variations of their ramen recipe and their pesto pasta with sun-dried tomatoes and I've been pleasantly pleased with both.

But back to the ramen.

I liked this recipe because I already had a handful of the ingredients on hand and I was able to use most up in making this dish. The other big selling point for me was it only called for one pot to cook in - an almost must for me now that I've got a kitchen that resembles the play kitchen I had when I was five. A few variations I made:

• I used bella mushrooms because that's what I had on hand and I think it was just fine.
• I used low sodium chicken broth and I think it helped the dish stay light and not too salty.
• The pictures for this recipe show a soft boiled egg but its not included in the ingredients, I added one to my dish for a bit more protein and flavor.

The recipe made about 3 1/2 servings - enough for dinner and two lunches at work which was wonderful. I'm looking forward to trying more recipes on this site - tonight's menu will likely be the quinoa enchilada casserole!