"ramen noodles" news and stories

• Big-name chefs have gone Ivy League in this unorthodox Harvard science class.
• Detroit, trying to inch its way back from the economic brink, is firing up some barbecue.
• Is Eataly, the new Italian-food emporium off Madison Square Park, good or bad for Italian food? "The short answer is: yes."
• Long before New American Cooking there was classic California cuisine -- Sunset magazine knows it inside and out.
• Craving some ramen? Skip the supermarket and hit one of these New York noodle joints.

For about 3.7 seconds today, I was asking myself if I have, perchance, been spending a tad too much time on Twitter lately. But, seeing as how said dallying then led to a deftly jazzed-up ramen recipe, courtesy of the author of one of my favorite food memoirs of the recent past, I don't see how any of us could afford not to. Kathleen Flinn is no stranger to the tireless, if sometimes penniless, pursuit of the delicious; The Sharper Your Knife The Less You Cry chronicles her loss of a lucrative corporate lifestyle and subsequent savings investment in a degree program at Le Cordon Bleu. While the the corner shops of Gay Paree may not have been chock-a-block with student budget-friendly ramen bricks, Flinn picked up a flavor trick or ten between puff pastry and boning lessons and shares her method for infusing the noodles with the brightness of miso, green onions, fresh herbs, Sriracha and citrus, as well as other light-wallet recipes.

Clearly, at-home ramen can be a reward rather than a last resort. How are you gussying them up, or are you hooked on the packet? Please share with the rest of the (broke...oh, so painfully broke) class, why don'tcha?

Kathleen Flinn's Quick Miso Ramen with Shrimp, Chicken or Tofu

Brittany Murphy is the American noodle princess in the film The Ramen Girl. Media8entertainment gives a plot summary of the film explaining that it's about an American girl who gets dumped by her boyfriend and finds solace in her neighborhood ramen shop. She eventually persuades the Japanese chef to take her on as an apprentice. Brittany Murphy's character then decides it's her lifetime goal to become a ramen chef.

Josh Friedland of The Food Section states: "this might sound like a bizzarro "Saturday Night Live" skit (or just a bad dream). But, it's apparently for real, as this trailer for the film will attest." Serious Eats asserts that the film is Tampopo meets Lost in Translation. Tampopo is Juzo Itami's 1985 cult comedy that as Friedland describes is "a 'noodle Western' interspersed with a series of satirical vignettes about food culture."

The film is already playing in theaters in Japan. When will it come to the U.S.? I have to admit...I'm sort of dying to see it. Make sure to check out the trailer, which is embedded after the jump.

Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen noodles and founder and chairman of Nissin Foods passed away on January 5, 2007 of a heart attack. Born in Taiwan, a Japanese territory at that time, he moved to Japan when his parents died when he was young. He had a varied career over the first half of his life, and even served two years in jail for tax evasion. It was in 1958, when he was 48 years old that he perfected a flash frying method of drying noodles so they could be quickly re-hydrated and eaten. He had spent many years inventing food products after the food lines he saw in Japan post WWII.

Chikin (Chicken) Ramen was the first of the instant noodle products released and originally it was an expensive, luxury product that cost six times as much as normal, slow cook noodles. Soon production methods dropped the price and we ended up with the inexpensive food eaten by nearly every college student and struggling bachelor the world over.

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