Barmy Blue's Bland Blog

How much is too much when it comes to salt? I’m rather concerned about this right now because I’ve been eating some pretty salty things and I usually eat a lot of salt anyway (blame mum, she eats more salt than I do).
Today I have cooked a pretty good little chicken noodle soup for breakfast, well, I guess it’s lunch but that doesn’t really matter. I requested some chicken breast when mum went shopping last week (I would have gone too but I was feeling quite sick over the weekend (don’t worry, I'm alright now)) I was planning to fry it in some tempura better I got a while ago but I haven’t felt like doing that at the moment and I was concerned for the chicken (we have a habit of throwing stuff out because we forgot to cook it and it went bad). So, why make it noodle soup? Well, the story comes in 3 parts, that was part 1. Part 2, the noodles. A few weeks ago, after having browsed a website with some pretty nifty Japanese recipes (most of which I can’t cook because I don’t have the ingredients, this neighbourhood doesn’t have much of an Asian community, so I either give up or improvise) and I decided one day to get a packet of udon noodles (I eat those kind of straight to wok stir-fry noodles a lot and I wondered what regular ones would come out like). I copied out a recipe for curry udon (since I like making Japanese style (with a few improvised things thrown in) curry I figured curry udon shouldn’t be too hard). Ha. I could get everything save for 2 things. Potato starch and dashi stock (that’s been my main problem, a lot of the interesting recipes require dashi and since I won’t buy it online (come on, buying food online, how can you be sure of what you’re getting? Plus I can’t really afford to go around buying stuff at the moment) you can make it but, well, there are only 2 that should be easy to make. One from shiitake mushrooms, that’s out straight away, I hate mushrooms and one form kombu, a kind of kelp, another ingredient I can’t acquire but at the time I thought I could, the other two are fish based and I am not beheading and gutting dried sardines). In the end I read that some westerners (I always find the use of east and west funny because if you go around the other way we’re east instead of west, just seems a bit silly to me) use a vegetable stock as a substitute for dashi so I figured I’d do that (we got some nice pork for this meal and I was not about to waste another load of good meat) Well, the meal came out well and I got through two lots of noodles (it came in a pack of 3) but I wondered what to do with the last lot.
Yesterday an idea struck me. I’m fond of instant miso soup, although I usually ad a little fish and some spring onions to it and some soy sauce for extra flavour (although I quite like it this does concern me as miso is pretty salty anyway) I thought how about some miso with noodles (unfortunately no fish or spring onions so I had it plain and it wasn’t so good. Had I used too much or too little water? Was it because it didn’t have the usual accompaniments? Was it because of the noodles? I don’t know. But I decided maybe adding some onion in place of spring onion might help (note to readers, boiling half an onion is a little unpleasant) I had half an onion left over from my curry udon and thought, why not.) Like I said, id didn’t come out as well as I’d hoped but it was okay, the noodles were under cooked though. I sat outside and ate it listening to a car alarm that’d been going on for a while, unfortunately all the action happened while I was cooking it so I didn’t get to see a spectacle of any kind, but sitting outside was nice, I haven’t left the house for 2 weeks, if I’m not careful I’ll become a Hikikomori . So I decided to sit there and get some fresh air until mum came home, it was pretty nice. Anyway, that’s how I came to have half a serving of udon left over today, I could only get half in the bowl and it was a rather filling little meal.
TodaY I decided to heat up the noodles and eat the chicken. I made a nice little paste to season the chicken, came out pretty well (one chicken OXO cube, some special chicken seasoning and some light soy sauce to make a paste (well, I couuldn’t use water could I) I spread it on the chicken and grilled it, then cut it up and put it in my soup which was leftover udon, a flavour packet from some supernoodles that I’d cooked with something else in am experiment a few months ago, the leftover onion from yesterday, another chicken oxo cube for the soup and some potato flour to thicken it a bit, a little more chicken seasoning and a little more soy sauce and a little more water because it wasn’t a soup anymore, just soggy noodles) The soup has come out well, I’m pretty proud of it, it has a nice flavour through and through and is pretty damn good by my standards. But, how much salt was in i?. I have half, I’m leaving the other half for mum. But still, even half of it must have quite a bit of salt, and when you add it to the salt I must have consumed yesterday, could this be a problem I wonder? How much is too much when everyone’s body and needs are different everyone’s tastes are different and you cane see exactly how much salt you’re putting in? It’s all well and good for things to say a product has this much salt in it but what does that actually mean? You can’t measure it and you can’t see it. The salt I do see doesn’t mug me that much, I know it’s there, even if it’s too much. It’s the salt I cant see that’s starting to bug me.

References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori