Homemade Instant Noodle Soup

Soup is the perfect meal for winter, but you wouldn’t catch me eating a pot noodle.    Oh no, I like to make my own soup, and even an instant soup can be quick and easy to make.   The only way in which this is more time-consuming than making up a shop-bought instant soup, is that you have to spend a couple of minutes chopping up vegetables and squeezing a lime, but how long does that take most people?  I have to be honest, I would never have come across this recipe if it wasn’t for coming across the blog, Jo’s Kitchen and her new event, River Cottage Rocks.   Obviously she’s a big fan of The River Cottage.  Now, although I have a largish collection of recipe books, I don’t actually have any River Cottage ones yet, but I’ve seen a lot of recipes online and watched lots of Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall’s tv shows so I decided to have a look online for inspiration.    As the theme was ‘everyday easy’, I was looking for easy, quick after-a-busy-day-at-work type recipes and I soon came across about 4 different instant noodles recipes.   The recipe I made is adapted from this one for hot sweet and sour noodles.  I’m not really a fan of sweet and sour.   I like savoury things to taste savoury, so I of course omitted the sweetness, used a different selection of vegetables, more chopped chilli, fresh ginger and added lots of fresh coriander too to add extra flavour.   Well, perhaps the extra chilli was a mistake – it was very very hot!   But apart from that, it was definitely a success, very tasty, still crunchy vegetables, and the noodles I used, although designed to be boiled for 2.5 minutes were properly rehydrated after 6 minutes standing in the hot soup.  Definitely the way to go for noodle soups from now on.

I would also like to submit this to February’s No Croutons Required, hosted by Jacqueline at Tinned Tomatoes.   The theme this month is fresh herbs.

Ingredients – Serves 2

2 nests of thin dried noodles

1 green chilli, thinly sliced, some seeds removed

4 mushrooms, thinly sliced

6 baby sweetcorn, sliced

Handful of sugar snap peas, sliced

2 spring onions, sliced

Small piece of root ginger, diced

1 tsp vegetable bouillon powder

2 tbsp soy sauce

Juice of 1 lime

2 tbsp chopped coriander

How to Make Homemade Instant Noodles

1. Put a nest of noodles in the bottom of each bowl.   Divide the chopped vegetables between each bowl.  Sprinkle with bouillon powder

2. Pour boiling water over each bowl so all the vegetables are covered.   Leave for 5-6 minutes.

3. Divide the coriander between each bowl.   Squeeze half a lime into each bowl and add a tbsp of soy sauce to each and serve immediately.

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