The Ghetto Gourmet: Soup Edition

If you're like me, you like to eat. If you're even more like me, you're also broke, cheap and lazy.

I haven't spent an extended amount of time at home lately, so I haven't been going to the grocery to restock on food. That means when I do wind up spending even one night at my house, I'm usually home alone with very little food options except for the things left in the pantry and embarrassingly old leftovers in the fridge.

If you're really like me, your desperate MacGuyver-like culinary instincts will kick in and find a way to round up a motley lot of ingredients to create a palatable, yet ghetto meal for yourself. If you're smart enough (READ: Cheap), you can make yourself a tasty meal at home for less than a Del Taco meal!

This edition will cover making soup incorporating things you really need to use before they go bad.

The essential ingredient for this soup is your run-of-the-mill cup of instant noodles. To add some kind of nutritional value to this meal, I added one egg - the last one I had in my fridge. I also added 1/3 full small takeout box of rice in there because this was a box of rice that's been in my fridge for at least two weeks after I took it home from work a week after a board meeting we had (Like I said, embarrassingly old).

Additional ingredients I'd strongly recommend but aren't required is soup broth and some sort of additional flavoring. I had an open container of chicken broth in the fridge that needed to be used, and I still had a bit of sesame oil to add to the mix. I would have added some soy sauce if I didn't have the chicken broth, but the powered soup flavoring and the chicken broth would have enough salt. If I had some Hot Cock (Sriracha) sauce, I could have added that, and opted out on the Tapatio or Tabasco sauces.

Start making your soup by filling your noodle cup with the advised amount of water and let it all sit in the cup for a minute or so and then pour the contents into a small saucepan (NOTE: I highly advise against substituting your broth for water. This mix is already pretty salty, you might as well dilute it, but maintaining taste).

Turn on the heat if you haven't already, then add your additional flavoring (I put about a teaspoon or so of sesame oil) and once the noodles were soft enough to yield, I added my rice. This rice was so old it almost was hard as uncooked rice, making me think it would take longer for the rice to soften than the noodles. Because I added so much rice into the mix, I eyeball added probably around 3 cups of chicken broth, or until it looked like the starch/soup ratio looked balanced to me.

I then added a dash of cayenne pepper into the mix, just to give it a little bite, and once the noodles and rice looked soft enough, I turned off the heat dropped the egg into the saucepan and gently stirred.




...and there you have it (I added the furikake topping for the looks, I didn't really like it in this soup).
Nomz away, and should you decide to make this yourself, share your experiences here.