BACK!

In 2005, I ate Mul Naeng Myun every morning for roughly an ENTIRE year. Sometimes, I even had it for dinner! I only quit because my source dried up - Kim's delicious noodles one day ceased to exist. Since then, I had a really hard time finding an alternate product of equal quality...

But now, the search is over and the noodles are back in my life, full force!



With the familiar toppings of hot peppers...



Or sometimes in a hot pepper-dashi broth...



Oh, my sweet Mul Naeng Myun, it's so nice to have you back in my life!!

And I recently discovered a convenient way to post pictures from my JP blog here, which means... more updates are coming!

A Noodle Lover's Favorite

I love noodles.

I can easily live without another grain of rice in my life, but if I were to swear off noodles, I'd be in some serious dietary stress.

Just to give you an example of my noodle-y obsession, I had at least one noodle meal for six out of the seven days for the past week:

Friday: Pho at Beef Noodle #1, San Jose.
Saturday: Stir-fried noodles at a mediocre Vietnamese restaurant.
Sunday: Noodle break!
Monday: Pho at Pho Binh.
Tuesday: Ramen at Kahoo, San Jose (soon-to-be-reviewed).
Wednesday: Ramen at Himawari - my favorite ramen shop in the Bay Area. Despite all the new shops opening, Himawari is my #1 favorite.
Thursday: Mixed so-men and udon in dashi soup.

My aunt and uncle who were visiting me from Japan reminded me that I always loved noodles. My poor aunt, who is not a big fan of ramen, told me that the last time she ate ramen was when she was in San Francisco last year!

The reason why I love noodles so much is because of its texture. I love feeling it flip and flop inside of my mouth, resisting my bite while dancing on my tongue. Soggy noodles are the biggest sin; even the best broth cannot rescue over-cooked noodles. As a noodle-texture lover, my favorite noodle dishes play up to the texture-aspect of noodle-y goodness...

Whenever I am making noodles at home, I try to add different noodles into one dish - spaghetti and parpadelle, so-men and udon, bo(stick)-ramen with pseudo-hand-pulled ramen. I love how fun noodles are when you mix more than one width, girth, or chewiness into one bite. Of course I have to stagger when I put the quicker cooking noodles into the pot, but the trouble is only 1/10 of the deleciousness.

...

......I might have to go make a bowl of mis-matched thickness noodles now!

Fusing Spaghetti Natto Style

I've been doing some wacky things with spaghetti recently. Spaghetti in my kitchen is no longer Italian or even American. It's ...borderless. Fusion to the max.

On the coat tails of the successful curry spaghetti (which is now a standard dish in my dinner rotation), I've been exploring different kinds of sauces. My most recent victory was the Natto Spaghetti.


Oh my goodness, this was so amazing. I am salivating looking at this picture right now.

I've already confessed my love for natto, but never in a million years did I expect it to match spaghetti so much. The slimy coating on the spaghetti only highlighted its delicious smooth texture. Each noodle was slick and seductively oozing with natto essence. Dashi-steamed/boiled edamame, fried tofu, and pea sprouts added more substance and refreshing change in mouth-feel.

This was so good and so unbelievably simple, I have to do a recipe-type description.

Goods:
1. Bring just a little bit of bonito broth to boil (the instant stuff is fine, or substitute with broth of your choice), seasoned relatively strongly with soy sauce.
2. Add chopped fried tofu and edamame to steam/cook ~5 min (depending on how soft you like your edamame), amking sure 95% of the liquid is gone.
3. Add pea sprouts just before the spaghetti is done.

Spaghetti:
Boil spaghetti for it to finish just as the edamame is soft. Strain just before adding to stirred natto.

Natto:
Stir, stir, stir until your arm is about to fall off in a big bowl.

Assembly:
1. Add cooked spaghetti to stirred natto, stir to coat spaghetti.
2. Add all of the solids from the Goods section and tiny bit of remaining sauce to the bowl with natto and spaghetti.
3. Serve and enjoy!

The longest time-sink is the time it takes for the water to boil for the spaghetti. After that, this meal is ready in 15 min or less. And goodness, it packed all the right flavors and all the right textures. Two thumbs up for natto!

Noodling on a hot summer night

The Papa Bear jumped the gun on this one last night, but no summer Kalbi session is complete without a bowl of mul naeng myun in my world.

I've mentioned naeng myun or neng myun (does anyone know what the correct spelling is?) before already, but I chose to not go into detail. I was waiting for the right moment to report about my obsessive love for these bowls of chilled Korean noodles... Reimen, as it is called in Japan, directly translates to 'cold noodles', and it is a definite staple at any respectable Korean restaurant in Japan. I grew up slurping these cold buckwheat noodles every time I had kalbi in Japan, which was quite frankly, almost every weekend...


Being the lucky girl that I am, I have a Korean collaborator/friend at work now, and she recommended a Korean grocery store in Santa Clara last week as the place she goes for her Korean groceries. She also set me on the right track by suggesting a noodle company I should check out whose products are sold there. With tasty, chewy noodles on my mind, I dragged my lazy butt down to the South Bay last Sunday.

And let me tell you - the experience was totally worth the 45 min+ drive!

Amazingly, as I walked into the grocery store, I was greeted by a sample station for mul naeng myun! What coincidence! I sampled a bite and was genuinely impressed by the chewy, flavorful noodles. The lady at the sample station told me all about how to best prepare the noodles, which she claimed she had made herself. The packaging looked homemade enough that I am inclined to believe her. I picked up a few of her noodles along with a couple packages of the noodles recommended by my friend. And boy, the kimchee bar - that was nothing short of amazing. So many varieties of kimchee, all available deli-style. That experience is totally worth a whole 'nother post one of these days.

What's amazing about these fresh naeng myun packages is the ease with which they can be prepared. Literally, 20 seconds in boiling water is all it takes. The soup packages are only OK, but with a whole heap of kimchee and other pickled vegetables, the weakness of the soup is totally hidden by the power and explosion of kimchilicious flavors.

And best of all, I had restaurant-quality naeng myun in half the time it takes for me to drive to Sam Won BBQ!!!

PS: Do you think pickled vegetables count as fresh produce? It's not really fresh, so I try to not think about it as a deviation from my NoCal LoCal challenge...

PS II: Some of my mul naeng myun packages claim to be arrowroot noodles while others are translated as buckwheat noodles. Interestingly, the ones that are arrowroot noodles also have buckwheat in them but have arrowroot juices as an additional ingredient. I'm planning a taste comparison soon, but if anyone has any insight on whether one or the other is the more proper 'mul naeng myun', please let me know!!