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Ramen 24: It’s Ramen Men, Hallelujah!

Sunday, February 25th, 2024

We’re entering the fourth year of chicken ramen reviews, and I think it’s been about 60 unique products now. And yet I keep finding more. With no further ado then…

Kung Fu Artificial Chicken (350 Calories, 16 g fat, 1510 mg sodium)

I believe his is the first actual racist product I’ve reviewed, what with not only the ‘king fu’ name but also the claim it’s an ‘oriental’ product. But I believe this isn’t made for a western market, so it may be entirely innocent.

The ramen itself was abhorrent. The noodles were slimy and gelatinous, and while the taste was probably going for ‘roasted chicken’ it instead tasted sickly sweet and absolutely not what you want in a ramen. This was a terrible noodle product, and an easy -1/10.

Paldo Bowl Noodle Artificial Chicken (370 Calories, 13 g fat, 1547 mg sodium)

This may be the first Korean example seen on these pages. While they are big ramen-eaters, every other Korean chicken ramen I’ve seen is spicy, and I’m only reviewing the plain ones. This looked good until I opened the spice packet, which instantly made me suspect they had simply omitted the word ‘spicy’ on the packaging.

And yes, that was indeed the case! This was – for me – far too spicy and I found even a tiny sip unbearable. It also tasted nothing like chicken and more like (hot!) nacho cheese Doritos! KLS liked it, and said she’d have eaten it all were she hungry. I’ll say it’s probably a good spicy chicken ramen product, but I won’t score it since it’s not plain chicken 🙂

Ramen Express Chicken Ramen (190 Calories, 7 g fat, 670 mg sodium)

I tested the cup version of this back in the fourth installment and gave it a very low grade due to an extreme lack of taste. Surprise, surprise: this brick version is identical! While it has a generous flavour packet, once prepared there’s almost no flavour at all, and it’s just like eating boiled noodles. I’m puzzled as to why this product is sold this way, or who would choose it over virtually any other chicken ramen. Suffice to say it’s dreadful, and like it’s cup brother only worth 2/10.

I’ve learned to never say never again with regards to this series, but it’s been several months since the last installment. How many months until the next?

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Sweat & Tears

Tuesday, February 20th, 2024

It’s been three months since the last post about salt and vinegar chips, and we’ve managed to scrounge up several more examples for review. Some of these deviate a bit from the definition of ‘chip’, but we made an exception since they’re in the same snack category 🙂

As a reminder the review systems is based on gatcha game rarity: Z is execrable, C is mundane, R acceptable, SR exceptional and SSR once-in-lifetime good! Although you won’t see some of these ratings today…

The optimistically-named Good Crisp chips are from Australia (and made in Malaysia to be sold in the USA) and are without a doubt the worst salt and vinegar ‘chip’ so far. They have a texture like cork or wood pulp, virtually no taste at all, and leave a chalky residue in the mouth after eating. They’re unforgivably bad and even the lowest possible grade of Z feels generous.

Like the previous, the Pop Chips are also ‘potato based snacks’ as opposed to traditional chips, but to eat then you’d hardly be able to tell. They taste like burned popcorn to me, and are weirdly rubbery when eaten. My notes when I ate them said ‘hateful and borderline inedible‘ and even KLS hated them, although it’s worth mentioning she thought they may have been miscooked! A shameful Z.

The Himalayan Chips are the store brand of grocery store Wegmans and we were expecting more than we got. They had a good sweet flavor, but the chips themselves tasted a bit stale and greasy and the aftertaste was unpleasant. I’ve had good Wegmans chips in the past, but these were disappointing. Only a C.

Pringles are the ubiquitous ‘shaped chip’ product, and I was expecting this to be great since I recall buying them in the past. But they had a dusty texture and the salt and vinegar tasted of chemicals and after only a few I didn’t want to eat any more. At best an acceptable substitute if you had a craving, but on the low end of a C.

Stax is the Lays version of Pringles, and as you may imagine from a market leader they’re fairly good especially where taste is concerned. The vinegar isn’t too strong and delightfully sweet and they’re easy to eat quickly. But they’re still ‘fake’ chips, and not even as good as an average normal chip, and far below a decent kettle chip. Once again debatably acceptable, but not better than a C.

The Sweet Potato Poppers were purchased for an exorbitant cost as a ‘health store’ and I was leery since they’re sweet potato! To my surprise they’re quite good, and to my taste buds indistinguishable from ‘real’ potatoes. Of course they’re not chips at all, and instead are an unusual type of weird spherical snack made of fried potato, but they were tasty and moorish and better than most. A solid R.

The Poppables are similar to the above and although a newish product, are likely what the above are based on. And to put it simply, they’re fantastic. They have the usual delightful Lays taste, are dangerously easy to consume in large quantities, and are probably the best example of a chip variant in this flavour. But they’re still not a ‘real’ chip, so I’ll only give them an R.

The Better Made chips were bought in an airport on the way to Japan, and at the time I was starving since I hadn’t eaten for many hours. As a result I probably remember them as better than they were, but as I sat in a plane eating them I wrote in my notes that they were ‘a very acceptable non-kettle‘ with a ‘wake me up taste‘ and a ‘hint of yesterday‘. I’m not sure entirely what that means, but I’ll assume I was in my right mind when I gave them an R!

With 8 more examples we’ve now tasted 35 different types of salt and vinegar chips (although I wish I had a time machine and could dedicate this series to Star Wars only examples). While these past few months didn’t provide us with anything truly great, we’re not giving up yet. But there’s nothing new remaining in nearby shops and maybe I need to venture farther afield if I want to ever make another entry in this series…

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McDonald’s Memories

Sunday, January 28th, 2024

That’s the first Australian McDonald’s, which opened in Sydney the year before I was born. From what I can determine, the first McDonald’s in Newcastle opened when I was 7, and since it wasn’t far from where my Nan lived it was a frequent treat after we’d visit her house.

Since then I’ve eaten at Maccas hundreds of times, and over those 40+ years many memories have been made. Here’s a selection:

As a child the McDonald’s calendar was an essential purchase! Not only did we hang it on our walls, we also coloured it in and – most importantly – we used the coupons every month to get free food!
Happy Meals were my default order as a child, and the toys (in my memory) were much higher quality than today. I fondly remember some Star Wars stencils that could be used to draw characters, that I wish I’d kept to this day.
Ice creams in those days were self-serve!

Graduating to Big Macs was one moment in my life when I felt like an adult. I don’t remember who it was, but I was at Maccas with a friend once and he got a Big Mac and I ordered a ‘Junior Burger’ and he asked me why I didn’t eat Big Macs! This prompted me to try one and I never looked back 🙂
Back when we had our paper run one time the newspaper came with Maccas coupons for free fries. We ended up with loads of them and I recall I had a lot of fries during the weeks that followed!
During the 1984 Olympics I remember my group of friends used to go to Charlestown Maccas after school and watch the athletic events. A girl in my year was working there at the time and she used to surreptitiously give us free food.

I used to love the cookies! Australia didn’t have a strong traditional of ‘animal crackers’ so we didn’t know that Maccas cookies were basically the same. Even well into my teens I used to get a box of these with my order and eat them on the bus home.
I also used to enjoy their strawberry milkshakes, although I haven’t had one since I left Australia.
In my last year of High School we organized a treasure hunt and one item on the list was ‘one point for every McDonald’s cheeseburger you bring us’ and we had loads delivered (as well as a phone call of complaint from a McDonald’s!). This was when microwaves were uncommon so we (me and the judges) ate a bunch for dinner and – to my shame – had to throw the rest away.

The frozen cokes I’ve ordered at Australian McDonald’s. During my summer trips it wasn’t unusual for me to have two or three a day, but these past years – since I’ve traveled in winter – it’s usually been just one. It’s the best item on their menu 🙂
When I first returned to Oz in 2000 I wrote a series of postcards on alternate days in the George street Maccas. Entitled ‘The McDonalds Series’, these are some of the oldest and most nostalgic postcards in my collection.

During our trip to Germany we visited many McDonald’s, often not eating at all. The reason: I was hunting McDonald’s glasses with ‘coca cola’ written in various different languages!
At a Maccas in Paris – on the Champs-Elysees to be specific – I ate breakfast very early and was the only diner in the restaurant. A man came and sat down right next to me and bowed his head until it hit the table. I quickly finished and left, and later that day my hotel concierge told me he was probably a homeless man looking to scavenge any food I may have left on the tray.

I could do a blog post on Japanese Maccas memories alone, but two that stick out were the Superfries (read about them here) and not once but twice being seated at a very busy Maccas and finding myself sharing a table with a young ‘office lady’ working on her laptop!
The memory I’m most proud of would be my 2022 achievement of seven identical orders in seven days at seven different Maccas (read about it here). Will I ever surpass this? No man yet knows…

So many years of McDonald’s! The irony is I almost never eat it in the USA since it’s usually awful here, but you can bet that any foreign trip I ever go on will include at least one stop at a Maccas. Let’s hope there’s many more memories to be made 🙂

Posted in Food, Memories, Miscellaneous, Time | 1 Comment »

Ramen Universes Beyond: Pokemon

Wednesday, January 10th, 2024

We bought the the above in Japan, and ate it in our hotel room. It is a Pokémon cup noodle and I’d tell you the flavor if I bothered translating it. But flavour didn’t matter, since it’s got little pikachus in it!

The above shots show the noodle before and after cooking. It was light on flavour powder, but tasted fairly good and I think I’d even eat one again. The little pikachu naruto were flavorless, but a nice addition. For an inexpensive product aimed at children, this easily got a thumbs up.

Oh and what’s the red packet visible inside the container once it was opened…?

It’s a sticker! Yet another reason this is a high quality product. I wish my favourite ramen came with a sticker in every pack 🙂

In addition to the Pokémon noodle, we also found this:

Cup Nyadle is a pun, since ‘nya’ is Japanese onomatopoeia for a cats meow. This therefore is a cat-themed curry noodle! The surprise comes when you open it:

There’s a cat face under the lid! The noodle itself is just a normal curry noodle (Kristin said it was ok) so the cat face is just a gimmick but if you’re a fan of curry noodles why wouldn’t you buy this cat version?

And lastly, a brief mention of this:

It’s a cup kitsune udon, which is a type of udon that comes with a large piece of tofu. The gimmick here is that a kitsune is also a fox spirit in Japanese myth, and this particular brand advertises using a cute ‘fox girl’.

I misunderstood the note on the bottom of the lid and thought the udon contained a trading card, which is why I bought it. It didn’t 🙂

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The Nugget Buddy

Monday, December 18th, 2023

I got a nugget buddy!

That’s the box it came in. You can get two different meals: Big Mac and Nuggets. I didn’t actually eat the food (JK and DH did) but I bought it since the nugget buddy was for me!