We found a one-star review for ramen lasagna, so we made it

one is the loneliest number

Happy spring, clowns!

It’s me, Davida. I hope you did your taxes. I’m fully rejuvenated following a mini vacation, so I’m letting Dennis relax too by taking over for this week’s newsletter.

Dennis has been craving lasagna lately, and last week he brought home one of those hefty Stouffer’s ones to stash in the freezer. But not before briefly considering making one himself, looking up a few recipes, and stumbling across one for Instant Noodle Lasagna on Recipes.net, which is what we’re exploring today.

The recipe never explicitly says so (it never explicitly says a lot of things, it turns out), but my guess is that it was devised not out of novelty, like those weird ramen burgers I’ve never actually seen anyone eat, but out of frugality. Since simply being alive isn’t cheap nowadays, it seems like the perfect way to enjoy the classic Italian dish for people who aren’t made of money.

It also only has a 1 star rating out of 5.

Perhaps if its author, “Misty Craig,” had presented it as an ambitious Japanese-Italian fusion venture then the lone one-star reviewer may have been more generous. But presumably, that person is just a hater who can clearly afford to visit the Olive Garden whenever they damn well please.

I want to disclose that we had to make a few calls to actually get this recipe to work.

The primary ingredients are 3 packets of instant noodles, tomato sauce, heavy whipping cream, ham, and a shitload of cheese. The very first thing we did was extract part of a shoelace from our cat Scorpion’s asshole in a crisis that presented itself the second I put on my apron.

Next, we started the sauce mixture by adding 15 ounces of tomato sauce to water.

The recipe called for 16 ounces, which seemed like an odd choice since the largest can we could find without buying too much was 15 ounces, so we took a risk by ignoring that last ounce.

Then we added the cream.

As we were pouring it in, a portion of it suddenly shot out from under the tomato sauce in a completely different part of the bowl. It reminded me of how in movies sometimes, regardless of where someone gets shot, blood comes out of their mouth. I know that’s a gross thing to say, but listen, you weren’t there.

The mixture immediately started curdling, so I whisked as fast as my little hand could to rescue it.

We added salt and pepper, and I felt like I was looking at the beginnings of a very luxurious tomato soup.

To begin building our lasagna, the recipe said to place a layer of uncooked noodles in the bottom of the pan. Skimming ahead, I noticed that only two total layers of noodles were mentioned. But the recipe calls for three. How exactly was this supposed to look? Was each layer supposed to be 1.5 packs of noodles? Was the lasagna meant to stack upward into the sky, reaching into the heavens to affront God like the tower of Babel? What the fuck kind of pans does this Misty woman own?

We resolved this by placing two packs of ramen side-by-side in the bottom of the pan, splitting the third in half lengthwise, and settling for the topmost layer of ramen simply being thinner.

Next, I poured half of the sauce over the noodles as directed.

Things were starting to look really soupy and I was starting to wonder if I misread the recipe name and it was actually lasagna ramen, not the other way around.

The next layers were ham and cheese.

In keeping with this recipe’s economical approach, we went with prepackaged Buddig ham, a childhood favorite of mine and a personal ambrosia as a stoned adult. The recipe bizarrely did not say what kind of cheese to use (it just asks for “cheese”), because apparently Miss Misty is a busy woman and doesn’t have the time to specify what type of cheese is in the goddamn recipe.

Mozzarella seemed to be the obvious choice, but her vagueness worried me. There was too much room for user error here. Is everyone supposed to automatically assume mozzarella when you’re already changing the game with a completely different type of noodle? Is your faith in the recipes.net userbase really that ironclad, Misty? You’re forgetting that everyone is stupid on the internet.

We then added the parsley the recipe called for in the middle of the lasagna, for…color, maybe?

In the center of the food? Surely not flavor.

This is where I broke down completely.

We topped off the second layer of noodles with more ham and cheese, and then it was time to add the TWO CUPS OF SHREDDED PARMESAN the recipe demanded.

I did not realize exactly how much that was to dump on top of a lasagna until about halfway through the first cup, at which point I started laughing. And laughing. And as I continued pouring the cheese, I had to keep pausing to clutch the counter, until I was fully crying. This was insane.

Misty doesn’t care about you.

She doesn’t want you to surprise your kids with a wholesome meal on a budget. She wants you to choke and die. And at this point I’m fully on board. We sprinkled an again unspecified amount of oregano on top and into the oven it went for a zippy 25 minutes.

The final result looked…okay.

Those two stacks of noodles were swimming in sauce, and I can only imagine what it would have looked like if we’d used whatever weird-ass vertical pan this is apparently supposed to be baked in.

Dennis bravely scooped out one of the stacks and plated it.

Notice a spatula handle in the background; that’s because he quickly figured out that if he tried to slide it off the spatula, the whole thing would collapse. So he left the spatula sticking off the plate, because fuck it.

We knew so far that this thing used bizarre measurements, was structurally unsound enough to be condemned, and contained a fuck-you amount of parmesan. But how did it taste?

Truly wonderful, it turns out. The parmesan and the ham provided a salty one-two punch, the noodles were cooked perfectly, and the sauce was nice and creamy. I’d just eaten lunch and I had to stop myself from going to fucking town on this thing. It didn’t taste like lasagna, really. It was probably most comparable to Chef Boyardee, savory and just kind of wet.

If you’re reading this, Misty, I take back everything I said. You were looking out for me the whole time.

BUT…THERE IS A TWIST! I finished typing that last line and announced to Dennis that I was done writing. He shouted, “No, you’re not!” and my blood ran cold.

What more was there to say? Did the lasagna come alive and eat the cats? (I wish.) No, apparently Dennis discovered while I was writing, that instant noodle lasagna was a thing on TikTok last year.

However, the version popular there was slightly different than the one presented here, so instead of deleting my draft, closing my laptop, and shaking my fist at those damn TikTok kids for once again disrupting the Weird Food Ecosystem, I will grace your inbox with this accidentally derivative content anyway.

Sorry, thank you, and good night. Forever.

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Hi! Dannis poppin’ in here briefly to tell you that yes, that ramen lasagna was weirdly okay, but that recipe was one of the most harrowing I’ve seen in the kitchen. I can confirm that Davida indeed laughed until she cried once she poured TWO FUCKING CUPS of parmesan on top of it.

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For this week’s paid-subscriber content, I’m going to try and use that meat glue from last week to put a hacked up chicken back together. One of you gave me that idea, but I’m going to have to dig around to find out who (email me if it was you!).

As always, we love you all, and I’ll hop into some of your inboxes later this week.