Tuna Noodle Casserole-ish à la Maruchan

Tagged: Cheese, Chicken flavour, Maruchan, Fish, Green beans

Would you believe this humble blog has gotten enough eyes on it now to receive guest posts? Me neither! Today's special is brought to us by wildweasel of Golfshrine fame.

Guest post by: wildweasel

I've had a long history of improvisational lunches; the kind of meals one makes out of whatever's in the fridge on a quiet weekday afternoon, plus whatever expendables are in the pantry (and not allocated to a bigger meal later). From a young age, I was combining packets of noodles with cans of soup, or chilli, or cheese dip. Into adulthood, I find the fridge still ends up with an excess of leftovers that aren't quite enough to make a full lunch, but nobody'll do anything with them, either. This is my style: Ramen Pseudo-Science. I proceed for nothing but the love of the game, well aware my creations go so far off script that they may arguably cease to be Ramen. Bachelor Chow, in some cases; an amalgam of vaguely nutritious meats and/or vegetables that tends to meld into a homogeneous mass of Food Product. (But probably still better for me than, say, a TV dinner.)

My most basic building block - my canvas, if you will - is the humble Maruchan Ramen, in chicken flavor. I find that the chicken flavor packet is the most agreeable to most other additions. My family has tried beef, and pork, but those just tend to overpower anything else that goes into them.

With the noodles cooking (hot water from electric kettle), I get out the rest of my additions:

• Leftover green beans (with chopped bacon)
• Leftover tuna salad (with mayo, chopped onion, and chopped apple slices)
• Shredded cheese (1 part Colby Jack, 1 part Pepper Jack)
• Black pepper, to taste.

The ingredients.

I add the green beans, and then the tuna, while the hot water is still softening the noodles, making sure to stir and mix the lot around. The extra ingredients being just out of the fridge does mean that the water cools down sooner than it ought to, but by this point in the procedure (water plus roughly 1.5 minutes), the noodles have mostly already softened as much as they need to. The tuna does still contain some juice (and mayo) that turns the water a bit cloudy as I mix it about in the bowl, but this drains out with the water.

On top of the mixture, I scatter a small handful of shredded cheese: a mixture of store-brand Colby and Pepper Jack cheeses. Nothing terribly fancy, but a bit of cheese rarely hurts, in my opinion. I then pop the bowl into the microwave for about 30 seconds, to get things evenly warmed and melt the cheese just a little bit. When it comes out, I grab the pepper mill and grind out a bit of black pepper. To drink, a glass of Pure Leaf sweet tea.

A lot of the issues I have with the resulting ersatz casserole stem from my just plain forgetting what all was in my ingredients. I had, for instance, forgotten that the tuna salad had apple slices in it, but the small container really didn't have all that much overall either way. The green beans and bacon formed the majority of the bowl's profile, and let me say that leftover bacon tends not to hold up at its best when subject to hot water and then a microwave. Slightly tough, limp, still tastes of bacon but not as strongly. Perhaps the flavor had washed away with the discarded broth. And this long after eating the entire bowl (a sign that it's at least a passable meal, by my admittedly not-high standards), I question why I bothered to add cheese, when I barely noticed it in the final mixture.

If I were to make this again (if circumstances were ever to chance upon the fridge having leftover tuna and green beans again), I think that I would consider the following changes to procedure:

• Don't add the extras until after the broth has been drained.
• Consider microwaving the additions separately before adding to the bowl.
• Either more cheese, or no cheese.
• Additional dry ingredients: a dash of onion powder? Freeze-dried chives?
• Consider not draining the broth?

The only other thing to ponder regarding my conclusions, is to examine my living situation. I am only able to do this kind of science because I live in a household where family meals leave a lot of leftovers to pick over. In any other circumstance I would have far fewer to choose from. Half of the art of lunchtime improvisation comes from not necessarily knowing what's on offer, and it'd seem to me like much of the magic would be gone if I were to need to premeditate my lunches with the intent of doing such combinatory nonsense. Then again, I bet the fellow at Ordinary Sausage goes shopping specifically for their nonsense, so where do I get off?

Regardless, I thank the resident Ramen Scientist for briefly allowing me (weasel) to stand at the lectern today.