Not really soup, actually, but it’s fun to use a relatively obscure Friends reference to title a post. Anyway, last night I finally got to use the noodle bowl I got for Christmas!
How did we get to almost April without having an Asian noodle dish? I am honestly not sure, but more such dishes are on the menu; I want to start exploring the world of ramen, and not just the sodium-laden stuff you get for $1 a pack at the store. I also need to investigate gluten-free ramen, so we can both use our nifty noodle bowls. (I bought another really cool noodle bowl for The Wife not long ago when The Store was selling a line of Asian dishware.)
Last night wasn’t even supposed to be our first Noodle Bowl Night in the first place! Our original dinner plan was going to be Make-Your-Own-Pizzas. I got a crust for myself, and I picked up several choices of toppings, and it was going to be great! Only, The Wife’s gluten-free crusts turned out to have started collecting mold in the sealed package. This led us to postpone the pizza night thing, and off we went to Asian Star, our favorite local Chinese restaurant. We were both wanting the Pad Thai, though, so that’s what we got: one order of chicken Pad Thai, and one of pork Pad Thai. Out came the new bowls, and lo, it was good! There’s something truly pleasurable about eating an Asian noodle dish from a deep bowl like this. It’s an entirely different experience from eating an Italian pasta dish from a wide and shallow pasta bowl. Not better, necessarily, but different, and still a pleasure.
And if I’m going to use a proper noodle bowl, it’s probably time I start learning to eat noodles with the proper utensils:
Mmmm, noodles! (No soup)
I had to look up “How to eat noodles with chopsticks” to make sure I had the idea right. The key here is to abandon any Western/American notions of table manners that insist that food should be consumed quietly and without any slurping. You don’t use the chopsticks to deliver a nicely-wound packet of noodles to your mouth for silent chewing; you use the chopsticks to guide a messy clump of noodles to your mouth for slurping the rest of the way, and you then use the chopsticks to keep the noodles from falling onto your chin as you lean over the bowl. This is another pleasurable thing to do, and honestly it seems much more sensible to me than some of the other weird table-manners things we do if we’re being all proper and stuff.
Anyway, time to start researching recipes for ramen and suppliers for GF ramen noodles!
Rice noodles are GF, IIRC. And I know it’s shallow of me, but one of the positive things I took from the start of the COVID era was learning more about Wuhan – including the local speciality, hot dry noodles (https://thewoksoflife.com/hot-dry-noodles-re-gan-mian/)!
Indeed, we will almost certainly end up using some variant of rice noodle. I just have to figure out which ones are closest to traditional ramen noodles in terms of “mouth feel”!