Making Ramen at Home.

So! We tried making Ramen at home; well Tom and Mallika's home, and it turned out pretty good! 

We followed basically the recipe from Brothers Green Eats youtube channel (these guys are just amazing). Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Icz13-Cj84&t=1s. 

Here's the end result: 

The components:

1. Turnips. Diced into bite sized, and sautéed with nothing but a little bit of olive oil until they've caramelized.
2. Cauliflower Florets. Salt+Pepper+generous oil coating, and left to roast in the oven for about 20 minutes (10 each side).
3. Tofu. Extra Firm Tofu cut into cakes, and cooked in a sauce made by reducing some soy sauce, a decent amount of maple syrup, and a little bit of rice wine vinegar. It did not get a crispy sear because we cooked it in the sauce. My bad.
4. Half-boiled egg. 6 minutes in boiling water.

5. Broth: A few Kombu (Japanese seaweed) leaves were heated in about a liter of water for about 20 minutes. Remove Kombu, and add Miso paste, as salty as you'd like. Additionally, chop a bunch of spring onion whites, garlic, ginger, and chili flakes and use these to flavor boiling hot oil. The flavors get imbued in the oil and you can add at least a few tablespoons of this stuff to the broth to give it more kick. Sriracha, soy sauce, sesame oil, can of course be also added.   

6. Ramen: Cooked in boiling water for 2 minutes.
7. Combine, and garnish with sesame seeds and spring onion greens.

Very hearty stuff!

However, I will say that with Asian food I still end up feeling like there's a bit of foreignness in the flavors. So when I make it myself, I get this sense that I may not be making this dish again even though I really enjoyed making and having it. Not sure why. Felt similar, but more so for the bok-choy soup I made the other day. 

Trip to Spain and Morocco

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Good food is the best use of money

I've come to the realization that one of the most honest things money can buy in life is good food, and electronics. But this post is about food so we will focus on that. All other uses of money simply do not provide the satisfaction as money spent on food does.

Here are three food orgasms I recently had:

1. Sea bass at Italienne, NYC. $35. Some thoughts: it is very very very challenging, viscerally, to go back to eating Salmon once you've had perfect Sea Bass, cooked with a most beautiful crispy skin, bathed in its own essential oils and herbs, and accompanied with the right savory sauce and greens. It is literally an eye opening experience. I dreamed about that meal for about two months, at the very least.

2. Bufala pizza, La Pizza & La Pasta, Eataly, NYC. Personal size at $25. Some thoughts: this is an experience that is like going from getting Naan in the US to getting Naan in India. (Of course this one I did backwards and my Naan life is a regular disappointment.) The Pizza you get at this place is truly worth every penny. Good Prosciutto and Mozzarella you can get at many places, but the dough is really what makes the pizza, just like it makes the Naan. I'm still dreaming about it.

3. Sencha Tea, Argonne National Lab old Russian folk Tea break, Free. (Tea imported from hibiki-an.com; $25 for 200 grams, or about 50 cups.) I must admit that I do not really like Japanese food. I've always held it up as an example of western obsession with appearances. A man knows how to cut a fresh fish properly, so what? (I'm not discounting Good Ramen or the taste value of good Nagiri, but let's be honest, this is pretty basic flavor profile and cooking technique.) However, good Sencha Tea is definitely something of a true miracle, and after reading about how it is prepared, I realize why. The best time to pick tea leaves is in spring; during the last few weeks of their lives, they are denied directly light. This prevents breakdown of thiamine into smaller amino acids that don't taste as good and are not as beneficial to human health and wellness. Finally, the leaves are plucked, roasted, and hammered into a characteristic long cylindrical shape. The brew technique is everything. 175F for 1 minute. Nothing less, nothing more. It produces a very mellow sweetness and feel goodness. Totally worth it.

Reminiscing

I was talking to a person about life in Princeton, and life in Boston. They said their life was so static; they didn't know what to do with themselves over the weekends so they just drove in to work. I told them how our life in Boston was so different. We used to walk so much. And I was reminded of the day we walked like 20 miles.

It started with an impromptu visit to our friend Dana's home in Brookline. We walked over 2 miles to reach her place. And from there we walked some more to reach the Arboretum in Jamaica Plains or Jamaica Pond was it? Then many rounds around the park, the birds were chirping, it was springtime. And finally we went to Dan and Jenny's place on Harvard Ave. Chilled there for some time, ate amazing sandwiches. Then we decided impromptu to walk another few miles to the Coolidge Corner theatre and watch the biopic on Ramanujam, or was it Turing? After which we walked back home. But it wasn't to end there. We then drove in Dan's jeep to an open air theatre to watch a trashy chick flick under a sky full of shooting stars. Scouty, our friend's dog really loved it. And finally we just stayed over at their place. It was fun. Life in Boson was good.

I can't wait to move to Montreal and to have more moments just walking around. Here's to new experiences and to new friends!