Ramen Isn't Just for Poor College Kids

Please indulge me as I share another non-quilt post.

Know what I shouldn't remember but do? Eating ramen for the first time. Ramen. Why? Probably because it's a taste sensation! I was six years old, and we had virtually no money. It was a year or so after my parents divorced and our neighbor was babysitting me while my mom worked. She gave me a bowl of ramen, and I slurped down every bit of that savory, salty broth and gobbled up the noodles. Those delicious noodles! It's still one of my favorite taste memories.

I'm ravenous when I eat ramen. Here we have an interpretive live-action retelling of me (Audrey 2) eating a bowl of ramen (Rick Moranis).

Though I don't eat it as often, I do occasionally buy the packages of the "de-fried-rated" noodles (they're delicious because they're fried, you know?). If you've never looked at the fat content, DON'T! One package is also allegedly two servings. Pfft! I've been known to eat a package dry while I cook another. Oink. I buy them at the local Asian market, because they have a lot more variety of instant noodles and several that are vegetarian.

Today I set out on a brief culinary excursion, into the world of homemade miso ramen. I've wanted to do it for some time now (think years), but I put it off for no reason other than there were Oreos to distract me. So after a quick trip to the grocery store, I used Peaceful Cuisine's YouTube tutorial as a foundation and got to work when I walked in the door after work.

It all came together surprisingly quickly, maybe an hour from start to finish. The only ingredient that isn't readily available at the regular ol' grocery store is kansui. It's an alkaline solution used to give the noodles their characteristic toothiness and pale yellow color. Baking soda can also be used, but from what I've read it yields a slightly different noodle. Other than that, it's a standard pasta dough. I threw it together, ran it through the pasta press a few times and then through the thin noodle cutter and voila!

Noodles! After cutting them, I tossed them with just a bit of starch to keep them from sticking and lightly gripped them between my fingertips and palms a few times to give them a little texture. Then I made a simple miso broth with some shiitake mushrooms, bean sprouts, thinly sliced green onions and a little toasted sesame seed oil. Dinner was on!

It was delicious! I love miso and am trying to make it a point to use it more often. It's a good way to add flavor to dishes (and sodium too, so not too much), and I'm finding more and more recipes that use it to add some umami to vegetarian dishes.

So now that I've made and devoured dinner, I feel like I should do nothing the rest of the night. That's precisely what I'll do!

Keepin' It Homemade

No sewing or quilting post today; I'll have one of those tomorrow.

I spent a lot of my morning in the kitchen today. Mostly cleaning up the mess, but also doing some cooking. I've always been a fan of making food at home rather than relying on pre-made meals, but I'm stepping up my game lately. Today I decided I'd give a go at making homemade tofu.

Though I'm vegetarian, I eat quite a bit of vegan food and Miyoko Schinner's fabulous book, The Homemade Vegan Pantry, has proven itself to be quite handy in my kitchen lately.

It was through this book that I started making my own yogurt which tastes so much better than store-bought. I've heard that for quite some time, but was very pleased with the results once I did it for myself!

The hands-on time for making tofu is pretty minimal, though the process itself takes a bit of time. I decided to also make my own soy milk this time...just to lengthen the process even more?

The process starts with boiling some dried soybeans (purchased from one of my favorite places in the Twin Cities, United Noodles) and letting them soak for a while.

From there, the beans are blended in a mixer for a few seconds until it's a thick consistency but not completely blended.

Once that's done, you strain the pulp. I used three layers of cheesecloth over a fine mesh sieve, and squeezed as much of the soy milk out as possible. The remaining flaky pulp is called okara and can be used in lots of different ways. I've not tried it yet, but there are plenty of suggestions in the book.

What remains is the fresh soy milk. I'm not the biggest fan of soymilk and I don't drink dairy milk anymore, but like the homemade yogurt this tastes quite a bit different than its store-bought counterpart. Better, I think. Now that I've got the soy milk, I can make the tofu.

You really only need two things to make tofu - the soy milk and a coagulant. I used nigari (magnesium chloride). You can use anything really for the tofu mold, but I used a bamboo mold I purchased on Amazon. It came with the nigari pictured in the photo above, but I used the liquid nigari I purchased from United Noodles.

After bringing the soy milk to a simmer and adding the nigari to the mixture, it quickly turns the milk into curds. It's the same as making fresh homemade cheese if you've ever done that. Within a few minutes, you've got tofu! You can strain it to your preference depending on if you want silken tofu or extra firm (in which case you'd use a bit more nigari when curdling the milk and then press it for longer).

Once the mold is in the sink (make sure that baby is empty and clean!) and lined with the cloth, I poured in the curds and let the whey separate.

I like a firm tofu most of the time, so I folded over the cloth, put the wooden insert into the mold and weighed it down with a heavy can to press out more of the liquid. Shout out to the jackfruit for doing the heavy work!

After 30 minutes or so, I had a block of tofu. Isn't it the most gorgeous thing you've ever seen?! Actually, it's not. At all. It's a pretty average first try, but I didn't want to make a full block of it the first go-around, so I made a pretty small recipe. It tastes delicious! It's more delicate in taste than store-bought and is so much fresher. I'm sure I'll be making this again.

I was in my sewing room all last night, and I'll be back with an update on that tomorrow!

Off to the The Quilter & Weekend Tidbits

It felt good to get another quilt top done, but once that part of the process is done I get obsessed with piecing the backing. It's another one of those thing where if I don't do it now, I won't do it all. I'm not always the most adventurous with the back of the quilt - often just a solid color - because I like the focus on the top and because...lazy. But this weekend was a start in the right direction! Still not the most creative, but I pieced four different small prints together.

It should look nice with the quilt, a 69-inch square. I don't know if I'll ever get tired of this happening when I'm piecing...

Those points lining up properly on a four-patch make me giddy. I folded it up neatly with the top and 100% cotton batting and off to the quilter it went!

When I don't do the quilting myself, I always take it to the good people at Millie P's Quilt Shop in Anoka, MN. They do a terrific job of quilting and are always very friendly. The downside is this -- I can't just drop off the quilt and go. I've always got to shop, and they've got a large fabric selection. How I managed to leave with only two yards of solids is beyond me (actually, it's because I spent $60 the day before at SR Harris).

I picked out a pattern and soft yellow thread for the quilt, got an estimate of a 4-week turnaround (baaa!) and decided to do some shopping.

The big draw to Anoka for a lot of shoppers is the antique shops. There are a lot of them, and they are stuffed with lots of goodies. So stuffed with old things that after a while, my throat gets dry, my eyes start itching, and I get a headache. Allergies are a joy. I stopped into Amore Antiques and walked out with this beauty.

There's a tiny scratch on one side, but $23 for a vintage pink Pyrex casserole? Shoooo...my mama didn't raise no fool!

I planned on doing some quilting today, but after a look around my messy sewing room, I couldn't do it. I had to put some stuffz in order. Things were a mess. I try my best to put fabrics away as I'm done using them, but I was in such a hurry to get the quilt top off to the quilt shop, that there was fabric everywhere. EVERY.WHERE. I folded up the fat quarters that were mostly in tact and cut the rest up into strips for later use -- 1.5", 2.5", 3.5" and 5".

Now things are in a semi-orderly state, I can sit do other things I enjoy like nerdy kitchen alchemy. Today I made a fresh batch of soy cashew yogurt.

It's tangy, creamy, smooth and delicious. It's also very easy to make. I'm vegetarian, inching toward vegan and trying to cut out as much dairy as I can. Most of the time when people say, "It tastes just like the real thing!" I don't believe them. This, however, is an exception. I buy plain yogurt and sweeten it myself with a little fruit and agave syrup, and this tastes every bit as good as regular plain dairy yogurt. Actually, better. Homemade yogurt is one of those things that really does taste better than store bought. It's also great for cooking.

The house is quiet, things are in order and now I'll sit down and watch a little (okay, a lot) of Investigation Discovery. It's my drug of choice.