Delicious lunch

I am notorious for not being able to cook. Not even a little bit. My scandalously short reportoire of things I am able to cook well includes : watercress soup (sounds impressive, but really you just open up a can of chicken stock and throw the watercress in there with a bit of ham), scrambled eggs, and rice in a rice pot. The one time I made cookies from scratch years ago, I didn't know very much about baking (which sadly hasn't changed that much) and we ran out of salt. Being the genius that I am, I said "Aha! I will use Hawaiian salt (rock salt) and it will be just as good!" Well, in case you don't know (I sure didn't), rock salt will not dissolve in the cookie batter, even if you mix it like crazy. When you bit into that batch of cookies, you got a lovely taste of chocolate, cookie, and SALT. It was a dismal failure, much to the glee of my pro baking family.

Well, today, I actually added something to my recipe list; saimin! Okay okay, I didn't really cook it; I more like found some noodles in the freezer, threw them in the pot, and used leftover ingredients to make it mo' `ono (more delicious!).

For people who aren't familiar, saimin is what we call ramen here in Hawai`i, and you only use the package stuff if you are truly, truly desperate because frozen noodles taste much better and have waaaay less fat and sodium than the dried package ones. I made it real Hawaiian style with a bit of hard-boiled egg (yum), green onion (yum), spam (see, I told you it was Hawaiian style) and a pat of butter. I've never tried the butter or egg thing before, but I see them as "extras" you can buy for you saimin on menus so I figured I would try them on my own for free! Not bad, not bad; the egg was good but I think I'll skip the butter next time to make it healthier and probably just as tasty. Actually, I'm not sure how healthy this lunch was because I also had a red cream soda from the local soda company Diamond Head Soda (you can see the little Hawaiian Islands logo on the can!). So, maybe not that healthy but very good! Prerequisites for eating saimin: chopsticks and newspaper placemat for all the slurping!