DIY Ramen Soup — The Pantry Feeds Us When the World Contracts

The lockdown settles in. Washington State is the epicenter. The streets of Fremont are empty. The farmers market is closed. The restaurants are closed. The world has contracted to the size of an apartment, and the apartment contains: two laptops, two people, one kitchen. The kitchen is the only room that matters.

I cooked every meal this week. Every single meal. Breakfast: rice, kimchi, fried egg. Lunch: doenjang jjigae with leftover rice. Dinner: bulgogi (from the freezer stash), or japchae, or samgyeopsal, or whatever the pantry yields. The cooking is not recreational anymore. The cooking is essential. The Korean food that I spent four years learning is now the food that feeds us in a pandemic, and the feeding is the providing and the providing is the survival and the survival is the cooking.

James and I have not left the apartment in ten days. The isolation is both claustrophobic and intimate — too much togetherness for comfort, exactly enough togetherness for love. We cook together every evening, the kitchen treaty operating under crisis conditions: his shelf, my shelf, the shared shelf, the gas range holding a pot of jjigae while a wok of three-cup chicken simmers beside it. The apartment smells like Korea and Taiwan. The smell is the sanity.

I called Karen every day this week. She sounds scared but stable. David sounds confused — not cognitively (not yet, that comes later) but existentially. The world he understood — the world of Boeing, of commuting, of golf, of Bellevue routines — has disappeared, and the new world of isolation and masks and death counts is not a world David built and not a world David can engineer. I said, "Dad, make something." He said, "Like what?" I said, "A birdhouse." He built a birdhouse. The engineer engineers. The builder builds. Even in a pandemic.

Saturday: Zoom dinner with Bellevue. Karen and I cooked simultaneously — she made pot roast, I made kimchi jjigae — and we ate "together" on video. The food was the same. The table was missing. The absence of the table — of the physical Bellevue table where I have eaten every Saturday for four years — was the grief of the pandemic expressed as furniture. The table is gone. The food persists. The love crosses the screen.

That Saturday Zoom dinner with my mom — her pot roast on her screen, my kimchi jjigae on mine — reminded me that soup is the most honest food there is: it asks almost nothing of you and gives everything back. On the nights when bulgogi wasn’t thawed and the doenjang jar was running low, I turned to ramen — not the Korean ramyeon of my childhood exactly, but a DIY version built from whatever the pantry held, the kind of bowl that James and I ate side by side on the couch while the empty streets of Fremont sat silent outside. It was warm. It was enough. In a pandemic, enough is everything.

DIY Ramen Soup

Prep Time: 10 min | Cook Time: 20 min | Total Time: 30 min | Servings: 2

Ingredients

• 4 cups low-sodium chicken or vegetable broth
• 2 cups water
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon sesame oil
• 1 tablespoon miso paste (white or red)
• 1 teaspoon fresh ginger, grated
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 teaspoon chili garlic sauce or gochujang (optional, to taste)
• 2 portions ramen noodles (fresh, dried, or instant noodles discarding seasoning packets)
• 2 large eggs
• 1 cup baby bok choy or spinach, roughly chopped
• 4 oz shiitake or cremini mushrooms, sliced
• 2 green onions, thinly sliced
• 1 teaspoon toasted sesame seeds, for garnish
• Nori sheets, soft-boiled egg, corn, or kimchi for topping (optional)

Instructions

1. Build the broth. In a medium saucepan over medium heat, warm the sesame oil. Add garlic and ginger and cook, stirring, for about 1 minute until fragrant. Pour in the broth and water and bring to a gentle simmer.
2. Season the broth. Whisk in the soy sauce, miso paste, and chili garlic sauce or gochujang if using. Taste and adjust seasoning — add more soy sauce for salt, more miso for depth, more chili for heat.
3. Cook the mushrooms. Add sliced mushrooms to the simmering broth and cook for 5 minutes until tender.
4. Soft-boil the eggs. While the broth simmers, bring a small pot of water to a boil. Gently lower in the eggs and cook for 6 to 7 minutes for a jammy yolk. Transfer to an ice bath, peel, and halve lengthwise.
5. Cook the noodles. Add the ramen noodles directly to the broth and cook according to package directions, usually 2 to 4 minutes. In the last minute of cooking, stir in the bok choy or spinach and let it wilt.
6. Serve. Ladle broth and noodles into two deep bowls. Top each with a halved soft-boiled egg, sliced green onions, sesame seeds, and any additional toppings you like. Serve immediately.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 420 | Protein: 22g | Fat: 16g | Carbs: 48g | Fiber: 3g | Sodium: 1180mg