I should probably add that this was a Christmas Ramen. Anyway, hello everyone! How are you on this fine – I hope – day?
I promised in my first of the year post, I am embarking on an adventure to cook a bit more this year. No particular reason other than I want to challenge myself a bit more.
As some of you know, I am beyond fascinated with Japan (hopefully I will live there one day!), so unsurprisingly my cooking adventures will be mainly around Japanese cuisine.
So let me show you the first creation and my cooking adventure – a Vegetarian Ramen.
It’s with a mushroom stock, soya milk, boiled egg, bamboo, kimchi and a couple more bits. And it is utterly divine.
Nothing like celebrating Christmas with a vegetarian Ramen…
A bit of a story. My sister got a Christmas gift from her workplace which blew everyone’s mind. It was all Japan-themed.
Everyone got a sake, a Japanese tea, a cooking book and a couple of other things. I mean wow.
So we decided to make use of the book while I was home home for Christmas, and we selected to do a vegetarian one since I don’t eat meat.
This vegetarian ramen is super easy to make. IF you don’t count the 50 mins of boiling the stock with soya milk.
Guess who was in the kitchen watching the stock/milk not to boil over, and who kept removing the milk skin for 50 mins… And that’s why I find cooking boring. I practiced my Japanese alphabets while I was watching the stock. Can’t believe I’ve even written this sentence.
Here’s the famous stock:
I agree – it doesn’t look appetising at all.
Its volume needs to go down by 1/3 and 50 mins is a pretty precise amount of time it takes for it to happen.
The rest of the prep is indeed uber easy. You just need to open all cans / packages, and boil the eggs. Here are all the ingredients bar eggs in a bowl:
And then we added the egg – my sister is a masterchef of boiling eggs:
And the final dish looked like this:
Yes, I know, I need to work on my food pictures skills.
Needless to say, this dish was utterly delicious. Everyone was surprised how incredible it was, and my parents even had a second helping of it.
And here’s the recipe
For those who understand Polish here is the recipe in Polish. While the list of ingredients sounds a bit off putting, it’s actually not too bad. And you can buy everything in a super market so yay.
For those of you who are baffled by all the words above, an English version below 🙂
What you need:
- 5 glasses of mushroom stock (we used vegetable stock cubes)
- 5 glasses of soya milk
- 1/2 glass of miso tare
- 1 glass of kimchi (fermented Japanese cabbage)
- 4 spring onions, chopped finely (we used chives because somehow not a single supermarket we went to had spring onions!)
- 1 glass of bamboo shoots (we used bamboo sticks bought in a jar)
- 2 soft boiled eggs
- 540g of ramen noodles
To make the vegetable ramen, you start with bringing the stock and the soya milk to boil. Don’t overboil it like we did… Then the stirring and waiting begins – you need to simmer this liquid foundation for 50mins until it shrinks by 1/3. I recommend doing something a lot more exciting at the same time.
At 40min mark, we boiled the eggs. And at 45min mark, we added the ramen noodles to the stock/soya and boiled everything together for the remaining 5 mins.
We prepared the bowls for the dish by putting all the remaining ingredients into them, and then topping it all up with the broth and noodles.
Mix everything in the bowl and… Ta-dah! 🙂 I’m still amazed how delicious this dish was!
Give it a go, and let me know in the comments if you liked it!
Also, here’s a different recipe for a vegetarian ramen if you’d like to try something a bit more sophisticated.
