Curry Chicken Ramen

A friend emailed me a recipe, asked if I'd make it when he came over - it looked good and not too hard, and it called for curry (one of my favorite flavors) so I said sure! I then lost the recipe and half forgot about it. Yesterday we were facebook chatting and the recipe came up... had to find it, but luckily the email search feature came to my rescue, the recipe was found and the day was saved.

Of course, I didn't go shopping for any of the ingredients and I didn't even read the instructions until today, while I was writing down the recipe so I would know what to cook.

The recipe called for potatoes, carrots, turnips, parsnips and other similar vegetables. I had carrots only so I sliced a couple handfuls of baby carrots and put them on the boil for 4 minutes. The recipe didn't call for onions, but I put onions in almost everything, so I chopped half of one and set it aside. Then I diced the chicken and put it in my large skillet with olive oil, 1 clove garlic (pressed with my trusty garlic press! I use that thing almost every day, if there is one thing every kitchen needs it is a garlic press!), and 1 tsp each chili powder, crushed rosemary, curry (I used red), and "grainy" mustard (I used a stoneground which had a bunch of whole seeds still in it, very tart and very nice). After a minute or two when the chicken was no longer pink on the outside I added the onion and drained carrots, stirred and covered.

(On a side note I used dried rosemary leaves that I crushed using my marble mortar and pestle. A mortar and pestle is not a standard kitchen object, but I think it should be. I may not use it every week or even every month, but there are some things that just don't turn out right if you don't have a set! I could have tossed my leaves into my herb grinder [i.e. our 2nd coffee grinder] but they would have gone too powdery. I could have crushed them by hand, but then they would have been too hard. In the end it was my mortar and pestle which gave me the consistency I was looking for.)

Then I started to rummage through my cupboard looking for something fast that would go well with this chicken. Pasta didn't sound right and neither did egg noodles. Rice and barley would take too long and I didn't have minute rice or anything like that. Then I found in the back of the cupboard a food I didn't remember we even had - ramen noodles. And I thought, why not? I can make them on the side and if they're terrible when I taste them together, I can throw them out, they cost 25 cents so it's not a big deal.

I boiled the noodles for 5 minutes and before draining, I reserved 1 ladle of the water. Then I added the seasoning packet and the ladle of water to the noodles and stirred, tasted, and of course they tasted like bland but too salty ramen noodles. My chicken called for 1/4 cup creme fraiche, which I did not have, and I did not have any suitable substitute, so I decided I was going to use milk and this recipe was just going to have to turn out anyway!

I stirred the milk in with the ramen noodles and tasted them again... you would never believe it but adding milk to ramen noodles makes them taste edible, even good! It was amazing, so I stirred them in with the chicken let it sizzle a moment and tasted this culinary concoction, to my amazement and delight it tasted pretty good! Next time I will probably add more curry, because I LOVE curry, but most people would probably prefer it with the current amount of curry.

I seriously deviated from the recipe on this one, but I think it turned out better than what the recipe would have. And I didn't feel like baking, which is what the recipe wanted me to do with the chicken and potatoes.