4 February 2012

Lucky Me! - Artificial Bone Marrow Flavour (Pinoy Foods, Birmingham Indoor Market) [By @SpectreUK]


On picking this instant noodle pot up in the Birmingham Indoor Market, Cinabar said “the only thing more disgusting sounding than bone marrow flavour, is artificial bone marrow flavour!” It states “true to the taste” on the outside of the pot. “True to the taste” of bone marrow? Yuck! It sounded positively revolting. It reminded me of those crazy people (no offence intended) that like to eat liver or kidney. Nevertheless, on a quiet Saturday afternoon, once I’d packed Cinabar off to the shops with her mom, I decided to brave this instant noodle pot made by the Monde Nissin Corporation, in the Philippines. Mind you, it had sat in a cupboard for several months and was reaching its sell by date!

There was a plastic fork, a silver sachet of food mix and a hard block of stringy noodles in the cardboard pot. There were 35g of ingredients at 150 calories in the pot. I opted for the usual metal fork, as plastic ones never get on well with freshly boiled water. The sachet had “Lucky me!” printed on it. I added boiling water to the noodles whilst I opened the friendly looking sachet. The silver sachet was filled with what looked like grey dust and bits from the kitchen floor. I dumped the unappealing contents of the sachet into the hot watery noodles, stirred a little, re-covered over the pot and left to stand for three minutes as per the instructions. I must admit, I didn’t feel particularly “lucky” when stirring the contents of the pot. Nevertheless on pealing back the lid there was quite a pleasant meaty smell from the noodle brew. There were bits of what looked like onion or chives floating around amongst the noodles, but there was no mention of these in the ingredients list on the pot. On tasting the noodle brew I found it had a suitable beefy taste, which went well with the beef and mustard sandwich and salt and black pepper crisps I had as an accompaniment. Whilst I ate my lunch I watched Kirk Douglas in the western movie, Posse, which was very good and had a great twist at the end of the film. The artificial bone marrow flavour pot noodle tasted disappointingly good. I say “disappointingly”, because I wanted to be amusing in my disgust of the concept of this pot noodle. How sad that I wanted it to taste horrid? As I said earlier, it had a subtle and understated beefy flavour to it. I even drank off the leftover liquid in the pot after I’d finished the noodles. This is a decent snack meal, rather than a full meal, but tasted fine and would be okay for a late night supper snack after a booze fuelled night out or just enjoyed with a sandwich and a ripping good western. Yeehah… Bang, bang!
By Spectre

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Um, okay...

What a strange name for a product, but I'm glad it was good.

bob said...

Glad to see that there's someone besides me that hates offal.
From childhood the thought of Steak and Kidney pie sent sickish shivers through my entire being. Blood Pudding...arggh!
Probably why I turned Veg, although the fake meat version of Cottage Pie is probably my favourite meal of the moment.
Detested the stuff when Mum made it, but now I go nuts over it.
Like my American neighbours say "Go figure".

cinabar said...

s.emerald - think spectre was expecting it would be bad, but was actually impressed!

bob - I'm agree about the offal comment, I just don't like the thought of it. I can't eat steak and kidney pie. I have had blood pudding and even haggis - but I try not to think about it to be honest! :-D

Shirel said...

I actually have a pot of these cup noodles in my kitchen somewhere that I've been afraid of trying XD I already tried the chicken flavour (It seemed the safest one of the lot) and didn't like it as much as the "brand" cup noodles we have around here, but now I think I'll give them a second chance and see what happens