With the year of meat behind me, I approached 2012 looking for a new culinary challenge. Since I don’t have storage space for sides of beef or pork, large scale butchery was out, and since I don’t have the parenting abilities necessary to nurture a starter, sourdough got nixed as well. Driven by my pretty constant craving for kimchi and a fascination for the first two issues of Lucky Peach, I decided that in 2012 I will learn something about Asian cooking. And listen: I understand that I sound like a complete goober even saying that because, of course, the spectrum of Asian cooking is huuuuuuge, and attempting to learn “something” about Asian cooking is like attempting to learn “something” about quantum physics. It’s relatively certain that I will not understand much of what I set out to learn, and the likelihood of me applying whatever wafer thin bits of technique I garner is smaller than a quark.*

*This is one of the few physics words I know, and only because it is also a type of cheese.

I’ve shied away from Asian cooking in the past because it seemed like we could pretty easily get decent Asian food relatively inexpensively. I live around the corner from an excellent Thai and Cambodian place and there’s good Chinese with a mile. Also, I am a little intimidated by the unfamiliar-sounding ingredients. I feel perfectly competent spouting words like “vol-au-vent” or “stracciatella,” but “usukuchi” and “kochujang”? Eep.

But, what the hell, right? No guts, no glory. When presented with the prospect of a year of Japanese, Korean, and Southeast Asian experiements, Jay encouraged me to bring it on.

The bringing, therefore, commenced.

I started with ramen because I fell in love with the stories of ramen in the first issue of Lucky Peach and because my wonderful nephew, Patrick Halliday, is now stationed as a Navy diver in Japan and he recently posted some photos of “real Japanese food” including a bowl of beautifully constructed ramen. I also love anything with a runny egg on top.

Intimidation in check, I went to Asiana Market in East Providence and loaded up on various soys, mirin, konbu, and some noodles to serve as a back up in case my home-made ones bit the big one. I dug out a gorgeous pork shoulder, some neck bones, and a chunk of belly from the freezer, purchased a few months ago from Persimmon Provisions in a porky fugue; some chicken carcasses left over from two delicious Pat’s Pastured birds joined in the bath.

Konbu soaking for one hour. It looked like very cool leather; I would wear shoes made of that.

I followed the Lucky Peach technique pretty closely for the broth, the noodles, and the tare (Japanese barbeque sauce, utterly delicious and so salty your ankles will swell up just smelling it).

Ground up dried shiltakes, and one fellow who escaped the grinding.

The broth consists of the konbu water simmered for several hours with dried shitakes (ground up to release even more flavor), roasted pork neck bones, chicken bones, and some aromatics. This stuff smelled incredible.

Not the prettiest broth, but full of umami.

I slow-roasted the shoulder for about 6 hours until it was sticky and sweet, cured the belly overnight in salt and sugar, then braised it for 4 hours and, once cooled, seared the hell out of it to get a crispy skin.*

*You know how you always think of ramen as fast food? Not so much.

It took every bit of willpower I had not to eat this pork shoulder with my fingers.

 And now, the noodles. Oh, the noodles. Those bouncy yellow ramen noodles. Again, I followed the recipe in the first issue of Lucky Peach, not remembering OF COURSE that Chang, et. al, had printed a corrected version of the alkaline noodles in the second issue of said beautifully printed magazine. My incorrectly made noodles did what most incorrectly made noodles do: they failed to act as individual entities. A globular mass that tasted like aspirin*. Blech.

*And not the cute peachy baby aspirin that you always kind of liked when you were a kid. You know: they had that that vague flavor that wasn’t like orange-the-fruit but rather orange-the-color. My noodles = not that. My noodles = full on Bayer. I should further note that I was informed of the correction by the lovely Katie McManus, but by that point I was already well in the weeds.

So, in a rare bit of luck, the Jamie of yesterday DID NOT screw over the Jamie of today* because the Jamie of yesterday bought back-up noodles at the market, and dinner was therefore saved.

*I owe this concept to my husband. He has always clucked and shaken his head when the he of times past acted in a negligent way that made the him of present times suffer. Conversely, he’s always quite proud when the yesterday Jay has done the today Jay a solid.

Dinner!

The final result: a steaming bowl of noodles, pork shoulder, pork belly, steamed spinach, scallions, and a soft-cooked Pat’s egg. I am not ashamed to say that we ate bowls and bowls of this, drizzled with bacon fat. I’ve got scads of yummy broth leftover, so I hope to have another go at those noodles soon (hopefully without the cursing at David Chang).

In honor of this yummy dish, I dedicate this song, from Elvis Costello’s 2008 album “Momofuku,” titled in homage to Momofuku Ando, the man who invented instant ramen.