Monday, April 13, 2015

The Zen of Ramen

My fascination for eating Ramen noodles has reached another peak.

For the past year I've been consistently eating expensive Ramen noodles in downtown San Francisco and its been one of my most pleasurable vices to date.

My favorite place to eat noodles is Ajisen Ramen @ the food court in the Nordstrom Shopping Centre.  My favorite flavor is spicy beef, the spicy broth is literally the best I ever had which keeps me coming back for more.

When I first started eating Ramen, I was very inexperienced with using chopsticks.  Onlookers sitting at other tables use to give me strange looks as I figured out non-traditional ways to gather noodles with my chopsticks and shove them down my throat.

One year later, the way I ate ramen noodles changed. Eventually I learned how to wrap my noodles around my chopsticks with my right hand in a big spaghetti knot and then to sip the broth again afterwards with my right hand but I could feel I was doing something wrong.

I kept thinking to myself, how to these Asians stay so damn skinny with eating these big portions of Ramen?

And then I learned I was eating Ramen noodles the wrong way.

These past couple of months I noticed that Asians simultaneously use their left hand to dip their ladle in the broth and then gently pack their ladle with noodles with their right hand using chopsticks.  Was this the link I was missing?

I was a little resistant to try this at first, I wanted to continue to eat my Ramen noodles in the slothy way I taught myself but I could feel something wrong, it just didn't feel right.

And then two days ago I decided to conform to the general Ramen eating standard that stared in my face every time I visited Ajisen Ramen, now I would scoop out the broth with my left hand and gently packed in the noodles with my right and thats when I discovered pure heaven.

Sipping out the broth with a little bit of noodles inside the ladle made me connect with this 10,000 year old Asian custom.  No wonder why the Asian ladies who sat next to me always had so many noodles left over, they sipped out the broth first which left little appetite for the remaining Ramen bowl contents and all of a sudden, it felt right, it felt feminine, it felt light, proud and regal.

As it turned out, it wasn't my belly that I was trying to fill, it was my soul.

xoxo


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