Goan Choriz in Instant Noodles - Comfort Food at its Best

If you've lived in a hostel it's more or less guaranteed that you've experimented with instant noodles. Maggi and other brands were the backbone of our meals, especially if one wanted options apart from Mess food! Assorted vegetables, ketchup, chilly and other sauces, spices, pickle masalas, anything and everything was pressed into service to add zing and flavour and even body to the basic noodles.

I spent many happy years living the hostel life and one of the best things that emerged from those years is my concoction of instant noodles with Goan choriz. Slightly soupy, the thick and spicy sauce coats every strand of noodle punctuated with chunks of the fat and meat of the choriz beads - heaven in a bowl!  The unique flavours of this local Goan sausage are the foundation of this dish. The cheese slices cut the sharpness from the spices of the choriz and give the sauce a wonderful roundness.

I made some for my lunch today and my friend M pinged me to ask for the recipe. I confidently told her to look it up here on the blog. And then I thought why not dig out the recipe myself and send her the link. That's when I discovered, much to my horror, that I haven't written about it. You cannot imagine my shock!

Anyway, let me fill this terrible lacuna right away. Better late than never, correct? So here goes...

Noodles with Goan Choriz

Instant noodles - Maggi or any other
Goan choriz sausage - approximately 15 to 20 beads, peeled
1 small onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, chopped
2 slices Britannia Cheese
tomato ketchup
oil

In a pan fry the onions and garlic till just brown. Remove the onions to a plate.

In the same pan add enough water to cook the noodles. Add the flavouring spice that came with the noodles now.

Add the choriz and let it boil in the spiced water for a few minutes.

Break the noodles up a little and add to the pan. Let them cook fully.

Add the fried onions and garlic, a good splash of ketchup and the cheese slices. Stir to mix.

Reduce the liquid to the consistency to the consistency you like and serve.

I usually make a big bowlful and then get comfy in a big chair and enjoy it with a good book. The perfect dish for a solitary lunch.  No. I don't share. 

Noodles with bacon bits and cheese

Noodles! The word takes me back to those wonderful years in Pune that I spent living in the Deccan College hostel. I was officially studying there but you know how it is.. life offers so many better options :)

One of the best things I brought back with me from those years of hostel life was a hundred ways to cook noodles. The short cut kind of course. Those days my preferred brand was Top Ramen. I found the noodles to be finer than Maggi and they didn't clump up as much.

Now, if you've ever lived in a hostel you have a fair idea how desperate one is for good food. Not lavish stuff but basic good food. Our campus had a students run mess and the food was strictly so so and on some days downright awful. No surprise there.

Since the college provided no official mess arrangement many students opted to cook their own meals in the rooms. We could use a hot plate or even set up a full fledged kitchen with a gas stove and everything! I had a wonderful hotplate with 3 temperature settings which made cooking even easier. Predictably khicree and noodles were the most frequent stars on the menu and there was no end to the innovations that these basic preparations were subjected to.

Here's one beloved recipe for noodles.

1 pack instant noodles - any flavour
2 slices Britannia cheese
fried onions
fried garlic
bacon bits
tomato sauce

Boil a cup and a half of water in a saucepan and add the sachet of noodle flavoring to it. Sprinkle the bacon bits and add the noodles at the same time. Break up the noodles if you prefer smaller strands.  Once the noodles are about half cooked add the fried onions and the fried garlic. Stir to mix and add the tomato sauce too. Once the noodles are cooked put in the two slices of cheese and stir to mix. Add a few more bacon bits  and serve hot!

 The wonderful thing about the cheese is that it makes the sauce wonderfully thick and smooth and incredibly delicious. I like the noodles to have plenty of sauce just like this.


Park yourself in a comfortable chair, find that book you're reading, put aside the world for a bit and sink into this bowl of absolute comfort.

I just did.

Marathon Bloggers Day 6