Use Your Noodles: Ramen is a Cheap, Easy Meal

By: Heather Chapman
Posted In: Entertainment

Your parents are back home, the semester is well under way, and things are going swimmingly. You’re on your own, and freedom never tasted so sweet.

Until you remember that you’re totally broke.

After textbooks and parking passes take their toll, what’s a poor student to do for nourishment once supplies from home are gone?

Enter the humble ramen noodle.

A perennial favorite of college students everywhere, “ramen noodles are cheap, and there’s lots of stuff you can do with them,” says University of Kentucky student Cheryl Jensen.

It wasn’t always that way. When inventor Momofuku Ando introduced chicken-flavored ramen noodles to Japanese grocery stores in 1958, they were considered a luxury item because they sold for six times the price of fresh noodles made at the stores.

Nevertheless, they quickly became a popular item in Japan, and by 1970, Ando’s company, Nissin Foods, introduced Smack Ramen to American palates.

Today, ramen noodles come in more than 720 flavors and are sold all over the world, and it’s not just college students who enjoy them.

People worldwide consume more than 41 billion packages of ramen every year, totaling almost $10 billion in sales.

Consider this: After boiling and stretching out the noodles end to end, each package of ramen contains 100 feet of noodles. If you laid out the noodles from all 41 billion packages end to end, they would circle the Earth at least 31,182 times.

But one has to wonder: Doesn’t eating all those ramen noodles get old after a while? Of course it does, if you’re just eating noodles and seasoning. The trick is to get creative.

There are several published cookbooks available at Amazon.com, but in the true cheap-o spirit of ramen, you can get plenty of recipes for free at www.mattfischer.com/ramen.

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c 2004, Lexington Herald-Leader (Lexington, Ky.).

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