Weeknight Ramen

Who doesn’t love a hot and steamy bowl of ramen with its long and slurp worthy noodles along with a luscious and aromatic broth?  Here’s a recipe that ditches the packets of overly salty (and frankly unnatural) flavoring and subs in a broth that’s flavored with garlic, ginger, mushroom, and green onions along with traditional Asian ingredients.  While this recipe calls for seasoning and searing off boneless and skinless chicken thighs, you can always sub in our grocery store hero, the rotisserie chicken if you’re looking to save time.  This soup starts off with searing off  seasoned chicken thighs followed by separately searing off your aromatics for its main flavor base.  After these first couple of steps, you can add your broth along with your soy sauce, sesame oil, oyster sauce, and chicken and let everything simmer together for a bit so that all the flavors steep into your broth.  Once your chicken is cooked, you can remove it once more from the pan while you work on the hardest part of this recipe, fishing out the garlic, ginger, and green onions (don’t worry, it only takes a couple of minutes).  After you’ve finished ridding your soup of spent aromatics, you can cook your noodles according to package instructions.  Ramen wouldn’t be ramen if it weren’t for some long and luscious noodles. For this recipe, I’ve opted for the pantry staple of ramen noodles, Maruchen Ramen.  The reason for this is because of the availability and ease of cooking.  I’ve tried several varieties of noodles and what happened was either a noodle would cook in the broth and make it too cloudy and starchy, or I’d have to use a separate pan to cook them in which would make this recipe much less streamlined.  Do you have to use Maruchen noodles?  Absolutely not!  You can use whatever noodle your heart desires. Whenever I drop my noodles in the pot, I usually take this time to sear off some greens like gai lan or bok choy to add to my soup along with chopping up some extra green onions for serving.  You can also cook up some dumplings, steam some carrots and zucchini or even serve this plain, the choice is yours!  However you choose to enjoy this soup, you’ll find yourself making it time and time again for the most delicious and satisfying meal.  Speaking of satisfying, did you know about that time my family and I broke a record for the best domino display?  The local domino league, the Domino Effects, was having an open house and my family and I decided to check it out.  They had all the fun stuff from little domino carousels, mini catapults, and of course all the dominoes you could ever want.  My kids with their engineering brains immediately got to work and began building domino banners that would reveal a picture, staircase sequences, figure eights, and almost endless lines that would cascade into each other.  Their teamwork was amazing and we all chipped in as a family.  After a while, the league announced that they would be closing up soon and we had to reveal what we had made.  We let the president of the club do the honors and tip the first domino, and what ensued was a 5 minute uninterrupted sequence of the most amazing domino effect we have ever seen.  Once the last domino fell, we were met with a boisterous standing ovation.  Later we learned that we had broken several of the league's records. My kids were offered a full membership, but they declined simply because all the cleaning up at the end was just too much for them.  By the time we were done, it had gotten cold and it was nearly dinner time. It was the perfect evening to whip up a pot of Weeknight Ramen to wrap up such an exciting day.