A few weeks ago, upon my walk home from uni, I decided to visit a particular store that I had never ventured into before. Now it wasn’t scary, and the staff didn’t look scary, I was just more worried about having no idea what I wanted, or what to try- I didn’t want to look foolish I suppose. But like I said, one day I thought… “Why not?”.

I have built this up a bit, but the shop I am talking about is my local Asian supermarket. I always think the colours looks so attractive in the windows, and I have been so intrigued by whats inside. I love noodles and dumplings and everything in between, so I knew I would find something that I liked- and I did.

I was amazed how great value everything was too, I couldn’t believe I had only spent around £5. I bought 4 packets of noodles, and a bag of spicy pork dumplings. One pack of noodles were seafood flavoured ramen noodles and were really tasty.

Today I chose to cook one packet of my udon noodles, once again these were seafood flavour. I guess these noodle packets are a bit of a cheat, but they’re so quick and simple and have such great flavours. I know if I tried to replicate them myself I would need a huge variety of ingredients. I guess I am a lazy student??

 
As the udon noodles come with one dry packet, containing spices and herbs, and one liquid packet, which I am guessing included the fish sauce flavouring, I literally just add 2 cups of water and let everything boil for three minutes.

You can have these noodles on their own, however I wanted to add some little extras to give it a bit more life. Today I chose pan fried king prawns, spring onion and fresh red chilli.

At the same time as I added the water into my noodle mix, I gently pan-fried a few prawns in drizzle of oil in a separate pan. They weren’t anything fancy, I only seasoned them with a bit of salt and pepper, but as the broth was full of flavour, I knew this would be enough.

This is when I nearly made a COMPLETE schoolboy error. In a bit of a daze I reached into my cupboard and pulled out my sieve. It was only when I had got to the sink that I realised that this wasn’t like cooking normal pasta or rice, I needed to keep the broth with all that flavour! Luckily, it wasn’t too late.

I decanted the noodle soup into a large bowl- it needed to be large because the portions are really big, however this meant I was able to keep the leftovers and eat them later on.

On top of my noodles I added the golden prawns, sliced spring onion and little slithers of fresh red chilli. I fancied a kick today so I added chilli flakes.

As I said, this dish did actually end up being really filling and quite large, and even though I was really hungry, I didn’t quite finish it. It was easy to reheat in the microwave for a few minutes a bit later on.

It tasted great, and left beautiful seafood aromas in my kitchen- I guess the ‘beautiful’ is subjective as to whether you like prawns or not! But I really do.

As one pack of udon cost me around 50p this is a great value meal. The prawns were more expensive, but I had added them to my Asda order a couple of weeks ago as a little treat.

The packet did have lots of other recommendations for different accompaniments, so I will definitely switch it up next time. When I finally get through all my spicy dumplings and noodles I will most certainly returning to the Asian supermarket to try something new.