ramen thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for ramen chefs.

Because making ramen from scratch is really freaking hard.

We followed the recipes as best as we could.

And at first, everything seemed great. Look at this pork belly. Awesome, right?

The noodles, sadly, were a different story. This was the first time we'd ever made any kind of pasta from scratch, and we had some issues with the noodles sticking together.

I also think we let them sit around too long after cutting them, which made them even stickier, and when we did cook them, they turned into one big doughy clump that sort of resembled a lumpy brain.

I chose not to take a photo of this.

So we went into survival mode and substituted with instant noodles. (Thank god we had a few extra packages in the pantry!)

Despite the noodle disaster, I was still very excited to watch our bowl of ramen come together.

The end result:

It was good (and I think we deserve bonus points for being brave enough to attempt this), but we definitely need more practice, especially when it comes to noodle-making!