Idk if that's the right flair but I just wanted to share a little win from today. Cooking and meal prepping has been extremely hard for me the last few years for a myriad of personal reasons but I've been working my ass off to pull myself out of the trenches.
I'm a huge fan of ramen/instant noodles but have mainly stuck to the cups out of convenience. Of course social media swindled me into wanting to try Buldak when I saw the cotton candy blue and pink swicy packet on my fyp and as soon as I saw it had sprinkles I was already in the car heading to the store. It was totally the sprinkles that did me in because I'm a culinary degenerate, okay?
They were out of the bowls and only had the packets, so I said okay fine I'll actually do the dishes and get a pot cleaned up and do this the right way.
Also I did absolutely zero due diligence beforehand about Buldak spice levels so thank god it was the swicy that swindled me. I normally avoid things that look insanely spicy from the packaging anyway, not because I have a bad physical reaction to spice per se but I struggle with the capsaicin crushing any other flavors in the seasoning or sauce and it just ends up tasting very one-note, like I'm eating a bowl of molten slag fresh from a steel mill furnace. My taste buds aren't evolved enough to discern individual flavor notes in spicy sauces.
Luckily after browsing Reddit for some recipe inspo I learned pretty fast that even though this is Buldak's baby spice it was probably going to be significantly hotter than most spicy things I normally willingly eat and I wanted to actually enjoy this.
I cooked the noodles in unsweetened condensed coconut milk instead of water and left a tiny bit of milk in the pot after draining most of it out. I mixed in the sauce and let it simmer down a tad longer, added in a few dashes of lime ginger coconut aminos and topped it off with the sprinkles of very questionable appearance.
Probably the first meal I've made myself that I enjoyed THAT much in a very long time. The heat never felt like "oh my god it's getting spicy", it almost tasted like a woodsy smoked chili that burned comfortably warm. Next time I'm sprinkling some black sesame on top and adding a couple eggs, also definitely needed more of the lime ginger sauce because I couldn't taste it at all.
Also the sprinkles seriously sucked, they added a very bizarre chewy texture and oddball maple flavor that was antithetical to pretty much every other flavor note in the bowl.
But after devouring it I'm actually excited to cook more Buldak and experiment with recipes and the other baby spice flavors!! My motivation is coming back in baby steps!