the ramen blog & other goodies!

It seems like no good news comes out of China these days. A Chinese brand of gyoza linked to a series of illnesses in Japan has been found to contain high levels of insecticide, and has sparked panic across the country. There are speculations that the dumplings were deliberated tainted, since no traces of the insecticide were found in the Tianyang Food factory that produced the gyoza. The incident seems isolated to Japan so far, but I would still pass on this brand of gyoza, at least until more details about the problem surfaces.

via Mainichi Daily News and the UK Guardian.

Jealous that Japan has all the ramen events? Southern California, our time has come! Japanese supermarket chain Mitsuwa is having a “Legendary Ramen Festival” featuring 3, count ‘em, 3 famous ramenyas from Japan. And yes, the link is in Japanese. I can’t find an English link. But you’re in luck! Here’s the info:

Asameshi Maeda Honten will be featuring a tonkotsu-shoyu ramen at the Costa Mesa Mitsuwa 2/15 through 2/18, the Torrance Mitsuwa 2/22 through 2/25, and the San Diego Mitsu 2/29 to 3/3.

Chibakiya will be serving an interesting-sounding chicken-tonkotsu-fish blend of ramen soup goodness. As an added bonus, you’ll be able to experience a hanjuku “half-boiled” egg. This will only be available at the San Diego Mitsuwa from 2/15 through 2/18.

And last, but not least, Sumire will be cooking up their famous miso ramen, available at the Torrance Mitsuwa from 2/15 through 2/18, and then at the San Diego Mitsuwa 2/22 through 2/25.

A big thanks to Keizo at goramen.com for the tip!

I apologize to everyone for having to endure the picture of Bill Gates on the home page for so long, and I guess I deserve this comment…or maybe not. Ahem…

For those of you who celebrate it, Happy Chinese New Year, the year of the rat!

Ok, maybe not. I have no idea. If you’re using Internet Explorer and wondering why there’s a big empty gap where the right sidebar should be, it’s because IE doesn’t like our new web site. To see the right sidebar, you’ll need to scroll alllllll the way down near the bottom of the page. Yes, after months of development and testing, we didn’t ever bother to test the new site in IE. Sorry about that, and we appreciate your patience as we sort out this mess.

Here’s what the web site should look like:

For more information on instant ramen than you can shake a chopstick at, check out the official web site of the Japan Convenience Foods Industry Association.

Some tidbits from the site: did you know…

The worldwide consumption of instant ramen is 91.6 billion meals annually (and that excludes Japan!)

There are almost 1000 brands of instant ramen in Japan alone.

via ampotan

Have you read our review of Cup Noodles Souper Meal Beef Minestrone? If you have, there’s not much more to add. Like the Beef Flavor Minestrone version of the Souper Meal, this shrimp (with tomato and garlic flavor) is basically an over-sized Cup Noodles. The big difference between this flavor and the beef flavor is that the soup on the shrimp flavor tastes more like a mild chicken soup than beef stock. There’s the requisite peas, corn, little carrot pieces, and I think I counted 2 miniature shrimp. There’s not much to make this particular flavor stand out from the other Cup Noodles varieties, and there’s disappointingly little shrimp, tomato, nor garlic flavor.

It’s Cup Noodles. It’s not bad. It’s not great. It gets a 6.