Source: Carlsbad Cravings
Snapshot Review
My Rating: 
My Husband’s Rating:
Will I make again?: For sure!
Recipe Difficulty: Easy
Time Involved: Quick
Occasion: Weeknight or sometime you’re craving take-out.
My Thoughts on this Recipe
This 25 Minute Spicy Ramen recipe from Carlsbad Cravings is so delicious! You all voted on Instagram for me to try this recipe, and I’m so glad you did! It is quick to make, and it was my first time trying to make ramen (outside my college dorm days, of course). We were impressed!
Ingredients
The main ingredients are three packages of ramen (you can use gluten free Brown Rice and Millet ramen if you need to do so), ground meat, onion, garlic, ginger, carrots, bell pepper, cabbage and many seasoning sauces. See the full recipe here. You can also adjust how spicy the recipe is if you are not a fan of heat.
Recommendations
My first recommendation is that you choose the best sauces. Carlsbad Cravings goes into detail about which brands of sauces she prefers and gives pictures, and that was extremely helpful because many of these were new to me. Read her post here.
My second recommendation is to make sure to prep all of your ingredients before you actually start cooking. Once the cooking begins, there is not enough time to be chopping. Most of the time in this recipe is prep, and the actual cooking only takes a few minutes, so get all of that done ahead of time. In the post, she even explains that you can prep your ingredients on another day to make this recipe even faster.
This recipe made four servings for us, and they reheated nicely later in the week. I did not serve anything else with the ramen.
I would leave the peanuts out next time, but that is just my personal preference. I’m not a big fan of peanuts (only peanut butter). Haha.
Future Ideas/Variations
Again, I feel like she went through a multitude of helpful options in the post. There are soooo many options for vegetables that you can add to this ramen. She mentions broccoli, mushrooms, celery, bok choy, snap peas, zucchini, asparagus, bean sprouts and so on. I think this could be a dish that you make with the vegetables left over in your refrigerator.
I also think you have a lot of room to play with the protein. You could do pork, chicken, turkey or shrimp, for example.
Final thoughts
We really loved this recipe, and it was fun to learn about the sauces. I will be trying more of the recipes from Carlsbad Cravings, for sure!