Girl Dinner with Late Romantic

A recipe that isn’t a recipe.

It’s the moments we are alone that we truly decide who we are. When my husband went away this week, I found myself living just as quietly as I do when he’s here: I listened to music, I cooked my favourite lazy food, and I went to bed early.

I’ve been cooking this same Girl Dinner since my actual girlhood, ideating on it and presenting it differently, and even – upon occasion – teaching other people to cook it, though I have enjoyed it in solitude many times. This is my comfort food and somewhere I can find myself: whether it’s to relax into a steaming bowl or rejuvenate with simplicity, I know this is a meal I can rely on, and it can be as decadent or as simple as I need. I think ‘girl dinner’ is what you do alone, with no eyes on you, and would choose to eat multiple times in quick succession. Satisfying food cannot be made without thought, but a true ‘girl dinner’ needs to understand the shifting priorities of life: am I seeking a veggie-dense meal to soothe? A meal as close to instant and thoughtless as possible? Decadence? Woman contains multitudes, and girl dinner responds.

INGREDIENTS

• 1x pack instant ramen or ramyun, any flavour [1]
• Vegetables
• Fish, shellfish, or chicken (any combo)
• Stock
• Aromatics, optional

For the most definitive version, choose:

• An onion, diced
• A star anise
• Marigold bouillon (1/2 tbsp)
• Seafood noodles with dried fishcake
• Skinless salmon fillet
• Bell pepper (1/2 one colour, 1/2 another)
• Leafy veg
• Frozen corn

METHOD

• Boil your aromatics (including onion) with the powder from your ramen and your stock. Add more liquid than it says on the packet, and let it infuse for a few minutes.
• Cook any veggies that require time to become tender, such as carrot strips or broccoli, and leave them much too long. Add processed fish at this point, such as fish balls or fish tofu. Go and do something else for a while.
• Add your noodles and protein – boil your salmon fillet whole for 5 minutes, your chicken in chunks for 7 minutes.
• Add 1/2 your peppers, any cooked frozen veg, beansprouts, and shellfish, and cook for two further minutes.
• Stir in your leafy veg and the remaining peppers, fish out any inedible aromatics, and serve in the saucepan.

I first got into Japanese food, like most people from the English provinces, through Wagamama. The original Wagamama menu (at least in Leicester) used to have a fish ramen, with narutomaki and a whole fillet of some kind of white fish, and I ordered it every time. Savoury and deep in flavour without being strong and rich like the South Asian food I was more used to, I loved the potency of the delicate fish in the mix. I was converted. I learned to make a proper fish ramen from a Wagamama cookbook and learned how many steps I could skip to make something that ticked all my boxes as the only vegetarian in my house, cooking for my teen self. I’d buy noodles from the Chinese grocery store and make my own simplified instant stock until as a student in Hackney I discovered instant noodles from their pan-Asian grocery store. Most recently, when my husband was away I made this ‘girl dinner’ with fish tofu, shredded roast chicken, and prawns. My vegetables were a ready-chopped stir-fry pack from Waitrose which focussed on foods my husband can’t eat. I relished it; whilst eating, I appreciated all the iterations my ‘girl dinner’ has been through to be a streamlined and enjoyable process, from shopping for groceries to lack of washing-up.

In the great tradition of recipe blogs, this has been not so much a recipe as a meditation on the impetus to cook this particular dish. In my moments of being alone, I choose who to be. I choose to write, to put things out into the world, but I choose to do it from the peace of a warm, brothy, fish-heavy tea.

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On This Topic:

• Rowan Ellis on millennial infantilisation is the person who had me framing this in terms of ‘#girldinner’ in the first place – this ‘recipe’ precedes the tiktok trend by decades.
• Get the food blogger meme, and also the tea behind it, here.
• This week I bought ramyun just because it had my favourite K-Pop Demon Hunter on it (Mira). The marketing works.

To-Do:

• Slides for CI Fest
• Slides for Rukeyser
• Queue up LR posts

Today’s Culture:

• Trying to chisel away at the mountain of ‘saved for later’ content (especially music) has got me neglecting my faves.
• Non-fiction has been my friend recently – I’ve been loving reading essays, and have been sliding fiction around my hefty factual tomes to meet my reading goals.
• Seeing the Wuthering Heights posters made me spend my Waterstone’s points on the tie-in edition of the book. I lowkey love a tie-in edition – who doesn’t want Benedict Cumberbatch or Lily James staring at them from their book? I know the answer to this is ‘a lot of people’ but I am not counted among their numbers.

[1] I have recently, and with some reluctance, switched to rice noodles, as one of the GF brigade. I didn’t ask for this life.