Epic(ly broke) Meal Time - Instant Ramen

This week – we get broke from eating out all the time during exams. SQUAWK being domestic gods or goddesses, we’re tired. And skint. We don’t got “YouTube money” to blow on real food like Harley and that lot – we need cash for the post-exam booze. So we buy cheap like SQUAWK instant ramen and pimp it with SQUAWKing leftovers to silence our SQUAWKing stomachs.

We assemble our cheap ingredients – because we’re organized SQUAWKers like that. We got eggs for protein. Mushrooms because they’re hip. Cheap-SQUAWK pak choi from North End Road, because not eating some of your 5 a day is for SQUAWK. Bacon strips? Bacon strips are for mainstream SQUAWKers. Not wannabe bankers. Good bacon’s pricey – we’re skint. Basics Bacon? More water than the Atlantic Ocean – SQUAWK no.

We get our instant ramen. We like Shin Ramyun/Ramen because it’s SQUAWK spicy and we’re tough like SQUAWK after all those exams. And it’s 120g. Double the size of Basics, still cheaper than two SQUAWKing Basics packs. Available in Chinatown/Bayswater. And it’s from Korea – Asians know their SQUAWK ramen and flavors. Korea, Japan, China – they’re all good choices. You don’t SQUAWKing mess with Asians. And their ramen.

We boil our ramen with seasoning and included extras like the SQUAWKing packet tells us to. Because we’re smart people and can follow SQUAWKing instructions. We’re just tired. But we chop and prepare the rest of our ingredients while we wait. Because we’re productive like SQUAWK. All that work in exam season ain’t for nothing.

We add our mushrooms and eggs in midway through. Two eggs, for two times the awesome. Not too early with the eggs because we don’t eat tyre rubber. If we had leftover chopped meat or SPAM, we’d put it in for more protein. You could. But we SQUAWKing don’t – we’re skint.

Pak choi leaves and pak choi leaves and pak choi leaves. We add our pak choi in the last 30 seconds because we still like it crunchy. Limp and soggy pak choi is for SQUAWK. We then take it off the SQUAWK heat. Because we’re SQUAWKing hungry.

We eat out of the pot because we’re lazy as SQUAWK to wash a separate bowl. We use the pot lid as a plate for maximum ghetto student factor. Just like the SQUAWKing Koreans do. We couldn’t find or afford a hot girl to eat our epic ramen like in the EMT videos, so we settled with a SQUAWKing Food Editor. But it’s okay – we’re skint.

A GlaDOS-approved list of ramen-pimping additives:

• Leftover chopped meat (if chicken breast, toss with a bit of cornflour to keep meat moist.)
• Mixed frozen vegetables.
• Cabbage leaves.
• Lettuce leaves.
• Processed cheese (famous in Korea and Japan for some bizarre reason.)
• Lime juice (think Thai.)
• [Leftover] hard boiled eggs - if you’re too chicken(!) to poach the eggs whole like we do.
• Miso paste (because we like umami and depth, not pure salt. Duh.)
• Extra spices (try star anise when boiling broth, remove before eating.)
• Fish-shaped crackers.*
• Fish-shaped candies.*
• Fish-shaped solid waste.*
• Fish-shaped dirt.*
• Fish-shaped ethylbenzene.*
• Pull-and-peel licorice.*
• Candy-coated peanut butter pieces (shaped like fish.)*
• Alpha resins.*
• Unsaturated polyester resin*
• A 20-ft thick impermeable clay layer*

(* We’re obviously pulling your leg.)

Food Editorial disclaimer:

Our instant ramen piece was obviously a parody. We at Food condone everything in moderation – that means consumptionof all types of food (and alcohol, obviously.) If you really are skint, fair enough; now you know how to bump up the nutritional value of cheap grub. But for the love of SQUAWK, please don’t eat this regularly. Pasta’s a better carb – just takes a few minutes extra, you can whip up a quick sauce while you wait, and it’s MSG free.

As the outgoing Food Editors we’d like to thank all our contributors for their hard work, the establishments who were great enough to let us review and feature them – and to you, the reader, for sticking around. See ya next year for more fun in and out of the domestic kitchen, and if you’re thinking about contributing next year – do! Or suggest stuff you’d like to see for next year. We’d love to hear from you.

Love,

Sophia, Yiango and Carol