Maruchan Chicken Yakisoba

This is a little prelude to next week's theme, DORM WEEK! Suggested to me by both Swagger and Captain Crunch, my roommate, we'll start on Sunday and feature foods that are convenient and tasty for college kids. Any ideas? Send 'em here!

So instead of reviewing the sodium-filled Double Down, today I'm kicking off that old college try with a traditional, sodium laden late night meal, the quintessential ramen dish. Except this time, it's not ramen, but yakisoba. There's an actual difference in between the noodles, but with a mass produced product like this, it basically means there's twice as many noodles in the packet.The noodles have that pleasant, wavy shape, and they're in a great brick. Some people stop here and crumble them into a salad or something, but we're gourmet and we're cooking these suckers up. The package comes with spices, noodles, and vegetables. It could be an MRE if it had the self-heating packet and the water, but I'm not complaining. So all I had to do was add the veggies and microwave it up.I, of course, forgot the vegetables and stared at the packet, remembering at the last minute that I was supposed to put them in pre-cooking. There's a nice selection of veggies, though, and it's probably all the students will get in a given week anyway. It's mainly freeze-dried cabbage and corn, but there are some bits of pepper, too.

The ramen comes out and you can drain or keep the water as you like. I drain it because the water is really, really greasy and makes the package slippery, much to my chagrin. It's a lot like watching liposuction after the noodles are finished. It's pretty gross. And then I mixed the package of spices in. That's nothing special, just chicken flavored bouillon in a bag, and that incorporates really well with the noodles. It smells kind of sweet. The noodles are always cooked to perfection, which I like, but there's a really slippery, greasy texture about them that always makes me want to wash them off. Dirty noodles! There are no icky hard bits, and the chicken flavor is all right. It's 95% salt and leaves a warm sensation in your mouth minutes after. Hear that? It's your heart exploding. It's a little like injecting Lipton soup packets into your arteries, but whatever.The noodles are impossibly long and interconnected, so every single bite you get looks like you've stabbed a Fry Kid in the head, and averages to about three bites per package, each the size of a steroid packed meatball. That's not to say that they're icky, though. Just gigantic.All in all, they're good and cheap, unless you buy them at the convenience store here, where they're $3.49 apiece. I could only stomach a few bite's worth because they're just too salty and greasy for me.