DINNER 38: Tuesday, February 7, 2006

Tonight, I ate at the house again, since Wendy is preparing for IRMA VEP at Falcon Theater and won’t be home until quite late.

My Snak Master is much older than the one in this picture.

As we were cleaning in the basement, I came across a SNAK MASTER machine I’d bought probably 15 years ago. Resembling a panini press seen through the prism of the 1970’s, it’s well-suited for making one of the items I had for dinner tonight — a cheese quesadilla of the simplest kind — just four kinds of cheese (cheddar, queso blanco, asadero, and monterey jack) inside a flour tortilla that got nicely toasty from the SNAK MASTER.

Then, I made some Myojo Ippeichan Yakisoba Japanese Style noodles (like upscale ramen noodles, if you can imagine that) to round things out. This is a fun product I first picked up on a whim at Jungle Jim’s, our local amazing grocery store (it’s a destination when out-of-town guests are here!). The first time I bought them, I was a bit confused when I opened the packaging — there were no English instructions inside, only Japanese. There was a block of noodles and four flavor packets — dried vegetables, nori, soba sauce, and an odd packet of mustard-mayonaise. 

With some perserverence, I was able to make the tasty noodles (dump a dried vegetable packet over the noodle block, dump in some boiling water, steep for 3 minutes, dump the water out, add the other three packets, and mix) despite the language barrier. They’re quite tasty and simple to make. They combine to make a delicious dish. Recently, Myojo has started putting English instructions on the packages.