Top Ramen Pizza

Yup, you read that right. Top Ramen Pizza.

I decided to have a bit of a dinner adventure tonight and this is what happened. Actually, it all started last night with a bit of reminiscing about the days of limited kitchen access as an undergrad where your only option other than the dining commons was anything you could buy in bulk at Costco that could be "cooked" with hot water (boiled in a coffee maker that you had to hide from your RA). One night in my first year at UCSB we made something called "Ramen-Cakes," which consisted of chicken ramen and eggs mixed together and fried in butter in the shape of a pancake. Not the healthiest, but sooooo good. Well, I decided to see if I could still find the recipe and instead stumbled upon hundreds of crazy ways to make unconventional meals out of ramen. One of those was to make a ramen pizza and it looked delicious so I decided that in honour of it being Friday I would attempt to make it! I made a fair number of alterations to mine, but first, here is the original recipe (in case anyone wants to eat like a poor college student for a night):

Top Ramen Pizza

from Dani Fisk
Wrightwood, CA

Hot pizza quick and easy the Top Ramen way!

Cover pizza pan with aluminum foil. Build up foil edges to form about 1/2" tall rim around the pan. Lightly grease the aluminum surface. Cook both packages of Top Ramen noodles in water with pinch of salt. Do not use flavor packets. Drain noodles and set aside. Brown beef, onions and mushrooms together. Drain excess fat. Stir both flavor packets into meat mixture. Set aside. Beat together egg, milk and parmesan cheese. Stir this mixture into Top Ramen noodles. Evenly spread noodle/egg mixture onto pizza pan. Pour spaghetti sauce over noodles. Sprinkle meat mixture over sauce. Top with mozzarella cheese. Bake at 350° for 20 minutes or until golden , bubbly brown. Let stand 5 minutes before slicing. Great for parties!

Ingredients:

• 2 packages Beef Flavor Top Ramen
• Salt
• 3 cups water
• 1/2 pound ground beef
• 1/2 cup mushrooms, sliced
• 1 jar spaghetti sauce (15-1/2oz.)
• 3 Tbsp. Parmesan cheese
• 1/2 cup onion, chopped
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 egg
• 8 oz. mozzarella cheese, grated
• 1 pizza pan
• aluminum foil

So, right off the bat, I don't own a pizza pan (who actually owns a pizza pan??) so I had to improvise and I just used one of our normal oven pans and built up the pizza shape with extra foil.

 Next, I read the directions wrong so when it said 3 Tbsp of parm, I somehow thought it said 1/2 cup...go figure. So I didn't actually measure anything for this (we don't have measuring cups that measure in cups in our house), but I looked at the packet of cheese that I bought and figured it was about half a cup and just threw in the whole thing, mixed it with an egg and my own version of 1/2 cup milk (half of a cup-looking size glass we have) and stirred it into the cooked ramen.

Now, as some of you may know, I am not a big fan of red sauces in general so I decided to just use about a tablespoon of tomato paste, thinned with some water, and just put a little spread of it on the "crust."

I decided that the beef didn't sound all that great to me, so I went veggie with my dinner and just sautéed some mushrooms, onions, and spinach with a bit of garlic and pepper for my toppings.

For the cheese topping I felt like making it a bit fancier than just plain old mozzarella, so I bought a cheddar/mozzarella blend and then added a few dollops of goat cheese for some extra class (because ramen pizza needs all the class it can get).

Baked in the oven for 20 minutes and viola! Top Ramen Pizza!

The really amazing thing about this whole experience was that it turned out delicious! And slightly huge, so I get multiple meals out of it :) The only criticism I have is that it doesn't really crisp up on the bottom so picking slices up was a bit difficult. Oh yeah, and did I happen to mention that the whole thing only cost me €4?

On a side note, it was a beautiful day today! This was just a quick picture taken with my phone on my walk to Tesco from the lab around 5ish.

We got an extension on our palaeopathology papers that were supposed to be due today, so I, obviously, haven't gotten far writing mine yet so I'm not sure when I'll get another proper post up here. I'll work on it, but no promises for this weekend.