The plan is that I make every single one of the NYT 100 Easy Dinner Recipes For Right Now. The plan is that somehow helps me riddle out the right now.
Last night I made, essentially, top-tier drunk noodles. If you’re the sort of person who is either too responsible or too cooking averse to approach a stove whilst intoxicated, you may not be familiar with drunk noodles. Hopefully, you spent your 20’s with plenty of late night takeout options and enough cash to afford a delivery tip at 4am. For the rest of us, drunk noodles is the breathless, why not, chaos fusion extravaganza that comes with realizing you worked a full day, ate dinner 6-8 hours ago (if you ate dinner at all), survived numerous rounds of well cocktails, and managed to get home in one piece and in time to realize that no one in the history of the world has ever felt hungrier than you feel right now. You decide to do something about that. How well it comes together is determined by baseline kitchen skill, pantry contents, and whether you’ll be wholly undone when you discover sixteen dried ramen noodles mysteriously stuck to your ceiling/pillow/tv remote/cat the next morning.
A good drunk noodle really only involves three components: 1) Noodles, of any variety (rice does not count, that falls under a different category of drunk food 2) Something that coats the noodles, in a mildly saucy/creamy way 3) Spice, often more than you would apply when sober. People will quibble with that last part. I have no time for those people. A simple drunk noodle may just be ramen with a slice of american cheese and a squirt of sriracha, or maybe boxed macaroni with Crystal. Maybe you add some grated cheddar and heavy cream if you’re feeling fancy, or some nutritional yeast if you’re dairy-free or somehow out of parmesan. Maybe you’re sober enough to throw together a poor man’s spicy vodka sauce (garlic and tomato paste and cayenne and vodka, if you can still stomach it, and some kind of dairy). Maybe you took an edible and/or haven’t been to the grocery store recently so it becomes necessary to get creative with the condiment shelf (peanut butter and fish sauce sure, but what about preserved lemon paste? marmite? canned chipotle peppers? creole mustard? green chile paste? harissa? ) Whatever works. Taste is entirely relative, so I’m not about to judge here. At best, you stumble onto something delicious and probably forget how you made it. At worst, well, you were already going to be hungover.
So, Genevieve Ko’s Chile Crisp Fettuccine Alfredo with Spinach is pretty much a gold-standard drunk noodle. And I say this as someone who was not at all drunk and enjoyed this meal a little after 8pm on the last night of daylight saving time in 2023. I didn’t mess around too much with this recipe. I am a devotee of chili crisp as a general rule. I hatve more of it than strictly necessary. In this case, I used two heaping spoons of Momofuku Chile Crunch because it was the nearest opening jar. I bulked up the spinach a bit and when I served, added a little cracked pepper and grated a little lemon rind on top. It was, spicy, creamy and magical. You can make it in 20 minutes. You don’te even need knives or a colander.
Accompanying drinks: Ice water. The mark of a good drunk noodle is one that can be enjoyed even when sober.
Soundtrack: I will admit to watching television while I ate. Specifically, I watched “The Gilded Age,” which is an incredibly stupid, boring and dull show that will always disappoint on class politics because I think Julian Fellowes still believes in Divine Right. But also somehow manages to underwhelm on both costumes and architecture (ostensibly the only reason to watch it. On the other hand Morgan Spector could end an ice age with single glance, and I am not too proud to admit it.
The Night: Ladies and gentleman, I’m finally-FINALLY— several days Covid negative (with a stack of tests to prove it). I spent the day mostly doing things outside the house, like buying groceries, going to the farmer’s market, voting in our weirdly contentious (yet critical) local election. The dryer is still broken so I’m living with crispy towels until I can summon a repairman. But generally, I’m feeling a slight uptick in spirits just in time for the world to be plunged into darkness for next four months. I went to one of my best friend’s birthdays over in Durham and was, as always, shocked at what seems to be an entire cities worth of new buildings that have popped up overnight. Nice seeing some of my favorite people though.
Next up: Probably curry, probably sooner than expected. Like maybe tonight. We’ll see.
Tiny Commotions 