by Ashton Liu | October 5, 2020

Need a dish that uses common household ingredients? This twist on instant ramen is perfect for when your cravings are acting up, but you don’t have much to eat in the house. The ingredients you’ll need are instant ramen noodles, sesame seeds, seaweed snacks, green onion, an egg, bacon, and soy sauce. First, heat your ramen noodles with water or broth in the microwave for two minutes. While you wait for that, you can start prepping your bacon and eggs. You can cook these ingredients however you like, but I’d recommend soft boiling the eggs and pan-frying the bacon to get a nice balance of texture. Here’s where the fun begins: add soy sauce and seaweed snack to your bowl of noodles, stir a bit to spread the flavor out, add your eggs and bacon on top, add green onion, and finally add your sesame seeds. If you’ve followed these steps, you should have finished your upgraded ramen dish.

Here’s a dish for all of you out there who seek a challenge in your cooking career—cheesed-stuffed mushroom burger. It’s also a vegetarian dish, so you’ll be saving the environment while enjoying your food at the same time. This recipe calls for a slice of American and Swiss cheese, two portobello mushrooms (de-stemmed and cleaned to where only the cap remains), bread crumbs, a beaten egg, flour, vegetable oil, mayonnaise, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, garlic salt, hot chili sauce, and all other components of a regular burger: lettuce, tomato, onions (optional), pickle (also optional) and your burger buns.

Now, let’s start with the hardest part of the burger—the meat. First, take your portobello mushroom caps, compress them under a plate, and microwave them for four minutes. In the meantime, grab the sliced cheese and fold the corners together into a ball of cheese. Now with your flattened mushrooms, put that ball of cheese in the middle of the mushrooms and wrap it all up tightly in plastic wrap. (The plastic wrap will help these components stick together and make cooking this meal easier.) Let this refrigerate for about 15 minutes.

While the patty is refrigerating, it’s time to make the sauce. Combine the mayonnaise, ketchup, Worcestershire, garlic salt, and hot chili sauce in a cup. Now here’s the part where it gets messy: take the patty out of the fridge and dunk it in your flour, egg, breadcrumbs, your egg again, and your breadcrumbs again, in that specific order. Finally, let this fry in a pot of vegetable oil until the patty looks golden brown. Now construct your burger with your burger components and voila, you’ve just made a cheese-stuffed mushroom burger!