Diplomacy happens one noodle at a time

Ramen figures prominently in my diet. I’m a single guy, so this is in keeping with the established order of things.

It’s not that I’m particularly poor (though I am) or uncreative in the kitchen. I was raised in the restaurant business and have been cooking for decades. I can make a quiche that’s lighter than air, stir fry Szechuan that’ll bring tears to your eyes, create an awesome venison stew, all without cracking a cook book.

But I don’t.

Because I’m single, the kids are grown and moved out, and ramen noodles are ready in three minutes. I usually toss in whatever leftover bits of vegetables and/or meat products I have in the refrigerator — the ones that have yet to sprout green hair — and voila! Dinner is served and I can go fishing.

I assume the nutritional value of ramen is roughly the same as the packaging it comes in, but I don’t care. I take a vitamin every day (purchased from the same dollar store at which I buy the ramen) so I’m all set with regard to health issues.

The taste of Ramen is OK; nothing to write home about, but I never wrote home about food anyway, or anything else, now that I think about it. 

The different flavors concern me, though. I mean, the chicken flavor is (supposedly) flavored with real chicken; the beef and shrimp flavors with real beef or shrimp. Which leaves one to wonder what they use to season the Chinese flavor. Real Chinese? I hope not, but things are different there; there is no FDA and China’s population tops 1.350 billion. Who really knows what sort of Soylent Green stratagem noodle manufacturers have come up with to turn a buck?

Most Americans think ramen tastes pretty much the same from brand to brand, from flavor to flavor. This is because it does. The Asian palate, however, is far more discriminating, at least when it comes to noodles.

Toshio Yamamoto, a computer hardware engineer from Japan, recently announced he has spent the past 15 years cataloguing all the Japanese ramen he could find. His noodle database offers information on texture, price, flavor and ingredients for over 4,300 different brands and types of noodles.

From this we may discern that Yamamoto is a) an idiot, b) likely to remain single for life, and c) a man in need of a real hobby.

Because of his diligent work, however, we can now check to see, conclusively, if Chinese people are actually an ingredient in any ramen noodles. Or rather we could, if we could read Japanese, which we cannot. (And when I say “we” I mean “me.”)

To me, Japanese writing looks like beautiful, elegant, squiggly lines. When I hit the Google “translate” button, some of the squiggly lines change shape slightly, but remain unintelligible to my round, western eyes.

I have a couple Japanese friends in Detroit who could probably help me with this, but I haven’t seen them in a while. Besides, asking them if there are Chinese people in their noodles might be perceived as racist. Being a liberal Gaijin (basically, the Japanese word for “honky”), I can’t let that happen.

So for now, I think I’ll just stick with the chicken flavor and avoid an international incident.

Mike Taylor’s book, “Looking at the Pint Half Full,” is available in paperback at Robbins Book List in Greenville and in eBook format from Amazon.com. More Reality Check online at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com.

Eat like a man, but keep the emergency room number on speed dial

I had my first single dinner yesterday. Not the first dinner I’ve eaten since being “re-singled,” but the first that was typical of what a single guy eats.

The Former Lovely Mrs. Taylor used to shop for groceries every week, whether we needed any or not. She would clip coupons, peruse grocery store circulars, find the best deals.

She “stocked up.”

When she left, months ago, the food remained, and there was a lot of it. Since then, I’ve mostly eaten at restaurants, when I remember to eat at all. When I did eat at home, I would just pull something from the cupboards, heat it up and chow down.

The easy-to-prepare stuff went first. Microwave pizza, burritos, White Castle sliders … these lasted about a month. The various bags and boxes of Fritos, barbecue potato chips and Cheese Nips – the sort of thing you eat with microwaveable food – lasted about the same amount of time.

Then a couple months back I started emptying the freezer. Hamburger, some chicken breasts, even the fish that had been in there since the kids were little; this stuff got me through another month.

If I could thaw it and grill it, it got eaten.

A while back, I noticed the cupboards seemed less crowded than they had been in the past. All of a sudden, I could locate a can of refried beans without digging around in there for a half hour. The creamed corn was no longer buried behind boxes of Louisiana Style Rice & Beans and stacked tins of kippers in mustard sauce.

I made Hamburger Helper. The box had been in the pantry since the Reagan administration. And like the Reagan administration, it was dry and hard to swallow. (You Republicans know this is a humor column, right? So no hate mail, please!)

I ate the tins of tuna and kippers in mustard sauce. I ate the creamed corn. What was left wasn’t always what I was in the mood for, but it was food.

Then yesterday after work I decided to whip up an early dinner before going on my nightly bicycle ride. I hadn’t eaten lunch or breakfast and was pretty hungry.

But like Old Mother Hubbard, when I went to the cupboard, it was bare. I tried the box of Saltines in the back, but what had once been white, crisp crackers had transmuted into something resembling an eighth-grader’s science project. At any rate, it didn’t appear edible, except by bacteria, apparently.

I checked the freezer. Behind the ice trays lurked a mysterious lump of gray-green stuff that might once have been a Johnsonville brat.

Wrapped in waxed paper and frozen to an ice cube tray were six slices of pastrami. On the bottom shelf was a zip lock bag containing four small pieces of freezer-burned garlic bread.

I placed the pastrami – which now had the consistency of shoe leather – atop the slices of garlic bread and topped it with some shredded cheese (which, amazingly, had not turned green). This I baked in the oven for 20 minutes, until the cheese melted and the other components thawed.

I actually drank a nice glass of Pinot Noir with this culinary repast. I needed the wine to wash away the taste of freezer burned meat and stale bread.

It wasn’t good, by any stretch of the imagination, but it didn’t kill me, either.

Tonight, for the first time in over 20 years, I’m going grocery shopping by myself. If I have to eat like a single guy, I’m at least getting some TV dinners and Ramen noodles.

Missed a week? More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.