I am not vegan. I don't eat meat everyday, but I'm not even a vegetarian. Being raised as an American with serious auto-immune issues have made me lean towards meat for my entire life. Meat replacements also simply don't work for how I cook, with me always treating the meat flavor as a key flavor that doesn't really have a replacement. I still believe this, I do not really see the value of converting non-vegan recipes to being vegan. Tofu only has the flavor of whatever it's cooked with, so anything meat forward like a pot roast simply aren't going to translate well. However, I'm still working on natively vegan recipes to try and develop food that won't disappoint. Also have to note, this is not made to be authentic. This is made to be more authentic than microwave ramen. I'm not Japanese or Chinese (not conflating the two because "asian", look into the history of ramen), nor am I trying to spend any real time on this. I'm just using ingredients I typically already have. Here's my first results. You can realistically make this in 15 minutes.

#TOOLS: 1 8 inch pot Microplane or fine grater Stove or microwave

#Ingredients:

• Salt

• Dried mushrooms, microplaned

Personally, I can't handle mushroom texture unless I cook them for HOURS. I'll use my microplane to grate these. You really have to do mushroom by flavor though. I used 3 mushrooms of different species for mine though

• 1 bit of ginger, microplaned

Do this to taste with because ginger is a different kind of spice. You could be able to eat pounds of ghost chilies, and that's cool, but ginger isn't capscacin or anything close. Personally? I cry if I eat jalapeno because of the heat, you generally don't want my opinion of capscacin, but love the numbing heat of ginger and szechuan chilies

• Garlic powder (prefer this over real garlic in this case)

Microplaning is way better than cutting in this moment. Why would you actually spend time cutting garlic when you're grating everything else?

• 1/2 cup of coconut aminos or soy sauce

Coconut aminos are a soy sauce alternative I was given as a gift when I learned I am allergic to soy. Thank you Sarah. Coconut aminos are similar to soy sauce, but have less of the extreme saltiness and umami of soy sauce, and leans more on the sweet side. I personally find this to be a better rounded flavor for ramen, and surprisingly find soy sauce way better to add to white people food.

• Green onion

• White pepper

• Smoked paprika

• Seasoned salt

• Canned corn, peas, and corn (can also use frozen)

• Noodles

• Sesame oil

Stovetop Instructions

1. Start boiling about 4 quarts of water. Grind your dried mushrooms, white pepper, and ginger into it. Also add garlic powder at this stage. You can also add some margarine at this step to give your aromatics fat to work with at the start. Let this sit for about 5 minutes to let the ginger and mushroom flavors to develop where they need to be.

2. Add coconut aminos/soy sauce in at this point. Taste for salt, then salt according to taste. Coconut aminos and soy sauce have such different levels of saltiness, so I can't even begin to give you guide wheels. However, I strongly recommend using seasoned salt for ramen instead of plain salt.

3. Add noodles at this point. I use Chinese noodles from the grocery store, 1 brick of the 2 in the pack. These will be done in 3 minutes

4. Start adding veggies. You can use fresh, but I find that there's very little value to using any of these things fresh. I had different cans for all of these, but I know there are frozen bags of peas corn and carrots. Frozen or canned veggies barely even need to be cooked though. Also, canned corn water is literally slurry.

5. Put in bowl after noodles are finished. Garnish with green onion, white pepper, sesame oil, and finely grated ginger if you want the fresh ginger heat.

Let me know what y'all think!