I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world. Mastodon Verification Link	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, was a late adopter of Twitter and left when it turned fascist, and always declined to adopt Facebook. He was a fairly early adventurer into the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

Food: 26 April 2026

Recently, well a few months ago, my niece ran in the Tokyo Marathon and my wife went to watch. When she, the wife not the niece, returned, she wanted me to make ramen soup for us on a more regular basis. This sounded like a good idea to me and a chance to play around with some new recipe ideas. As it happens, we've been having ramenesque soup once a week ever since.

I call it 'ramenesque' since it's almost certainly not a traditional or authentic ramen. There are no good Asian grocery stores near us, and the grocery stores that are near us have a limited selection of ingredients. At some point I'll be close to a good one and will be able to pick up some stuff to play around with, but for now I'm improvising. The results are pretty good.

The broth is fairly consistent, although I did try a mushroom variant not long ago, and I make it like this:

• a small onion
• poudre fort
• soy sauce
• worcestershire sauce
• tiny bit of rapeseed oil

Our local grocery store does have some decent noodles, sold as 'stir fry noodles,' which are pretty basic egg noodles. They work well in this. Morrisons sells them as part of a 'Stir Fry Meal Deal,' but I just get the noodles. They go in, the whole thing comes up to a boil for a minute or two, and that's that.

The rest of it varies depending on what we get in our weekly veg box, but always (or almost always) has hard boiled egg, green onions, and some pickled greens. I've got a jar of lacto-fermented ... stuff, to which I add more ... stuff now and then, and I use that. It's mostly cabbage, I think, but there's also things like broccoli stems, cauliflower greens, and so on.

I'll usually slice some veg and put them under the grill before adding them to the soup. Courgette makes regular appearances, but also carrot, celery, and so forth.

The batch in the picture, starting at the top and working clockwise, has roasted courgette (cut diagonally), pickled veg, crispy pork rind, some more pickled veg (I think), hard boiled egg, and then scallions overall.