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| Comfort Food, ya! |
She doesn't look very pretty, does she, this plate of home-cooked instant noodles. But that's because I haven't added any garnishing or cherry tomatoes or any colorful prawns or fish or egg or lettuce or tomatoes or any happy looking, colorful foods of sorts.
She'd look different if I'd added them. :)
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| With Tomatoes! |
Not one bit at all. Because, garnishing or no, veggies or meat or no, she's a great tasting little plate of noodles. Stir fried with a combination sauce of olive oil, sesame oil, worcester sauce, soy sauce, ketchup and a pinch of Himalayan pink salt, and the occasional dash of garam masala, she makes one of the simplest yet best meals ever. It's so good that I sometimes make special requests for it, and thankfully, I'm usually obliged.
Instant noodles are comfort food to me.
On cold, rainy days, when the winds are blowing and the season's monsoons are blasting, it is a steaming hot bowl of shrimp flavored instant noodles topped with an egg cooked just right and cuttlefish balls that I want.
Instant noodles have been a part of my family.
On days when instant noodles was on the menu, we'd each get out our own tiffin carrier pots, fill them with water, toss our noodles in, drop the ikan bilis cube in, and then put it on the stove to boil. And then we'd place in whatever we wanted from the frozen food stash in the freezer. One Parent would finish cooking first, cos the preferred texture of noodles was 'QQ'. The other Parent would follow after, cos the preferred texture of noodles was 'just right' with 'the right' amount of soup left in the pot.
I would be the last.
Always.
Because I like my noodles cooked to a texture that resembles pudding and which is clumped up together and is soft and chewy and slurpy all at the same time and I like seeing my cuttlefish balls bobbing around in the carrier whilst my egg gently poaches on top till the yolk turns orange and whenever I cooked, I'd have to watch my pot really, really carefully because the tendency to overboil was super high. With almost no soup left.
But I love my noodles this way. I love how they're all slurpy and soft and chewy and how they've absorbed all the seasoning with that distinct taste that comes with them being this texture.
It's not only rainy days. It's any other day. Seeing a bowl of instant noodles on the table in the evenings for supper or in the afternoons for lunch, brings a lovely smile to my face.
Soup instant noodles. Stir fried instant noodles. They're all comforting and reassuring to me.
I think it comes along with me being Asian. If there's one food that distinctly defines a person as Asian-Asian per se, it's gotta be instant noodles. As far as my mind goes, there is no Asian- never mind whether you're East or Southeast- that does not know what instant noodles are. From Japan to South Korea to China to Hong Kong to Taiwan and Indochina all the way down south to Indonesia, instant noodles of all kinds and styles can be found. You get the pho type in Vietnam. You get the vermicelli type in China. There's the ramen in Japan with fantastic soup flavors like miso and tonkotsu. There's the ramyun and the jjamppong and jajangmyun in South Korea. The Thais call their instant noodles Mama after their ubiquitous country wide brand and which has the loveliest creamy tom yum shrimp noodles I've ever enjoyed. And then there's everything else everywhere else.
Wherever we Asians are, chances are you'll find packets of instant noodles tagging along with us. Some of us have the most innovative ways of preparing the noodles- like throwing them into the electric kettle pot and watching over the water like a hawk. Some of us have come up with all kinds of ways to prepare our instant noodle meals and posted it online to boot. Some of us have featured cup noodles so much in the convenience stores that it has become a cultural export.
Which reminds me, I'm still waiting to buy my instant jajangmyun, stir in the sauce and eat it straight out of the Styrofoam bowl. :)