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National Noodle Ring Day 2024
Any day is a great day for a bowl of soup. Since today is National Noodle Ring Day, let’s get comfy.
Comfort 🥣 Food
I eat soup noodles for comfort. In fact, noodles of any kind. It’s a food that is very easy to eat; it’s very soothing and comfortable, too. If I could choose any, I’d say buckwheat was my favourite: it has a very good flavour and is healthy, too. ~Nobu Matsuhisa
It’s the middle-ish of December. It’s rainy, raw and chilly.
What better day to have a bowl of soup?
I remember having this when I was growing up, and it was appealing for a number of reasons.
- It’s chicken noodle soup. How can you go wrong?
- The ring noodles looked like the rings in that classic water toy where you pressed the button to squish the rings onto the pegs
LGR – Tomy Waterful Ring Toss Review
This is my childhood in a nutshell. Eating those delicate little ring noodles for lunch and pressing that button for hours on end trying to get the little loops on the two spikes.
I checked the pasta aisle at the grocery store the other day, but I didn’t see just the rings among the other pasta shapes.
Apparently, they do make them and they’re available on Amazon. They’re also listed as Anellini, which is Italian for “little rings”.
So, if you order some anellini or you can find some at your grocery store, you can make your own ring noodle soup.
Boil Water, Peel Packet
How To Make Lipton Soup Secrets Noodle Soup
Or you can do what we did when I was younger (and also last week) and just buy the instant soup packets with the tiny ring noodles.
Far be it from me to recommend that you play with your food, but if you happen to make ring noodle soup of the instant or DIY anellini variety, it’s a lot of fun to swirl your soup around and watch the little rings float around like they do in the squish-button game.
Soup is good food, but ring noodle soup is good fun.
Okay, that’s enough of me encouraging bad behavior.
If you’re concerned about overloading on salt, by all means, get some organic stock and dice some fresh cuts of chicken breast to throw in with the anellini.
There’s always a workaround…
🥣 Soup of Ideas 💡
A short story is one idea; a novel is a whole soup of them. ~Robert J. Sawyer
That’s an accurate assessment of my Holiday Season Serial Romances, to be sure.
I start off with a premise and some core characters. I get myself into Flow State, where I can watch the events unfold and transcribe them for my readers’ enjoyment.
It’s a bit like skiing with a blindfold on or Luke’s lightsaber practice with the blast shield down.
You’ve got to “Use the Force” and reach out with your feelings.
Well, you don’t have to. There are a lot of writers who fall into the “Planner” category. They build their stories like Lego dioramas.
They know how many pieces they need. They know exactly what it is supposed to look like.
It’s already done before they begin. They just have to do the work of assembling the blocks.
I haven’t gotten there yet. Not sure I ever will.
In fairness, I like my process. I enjoy watching the thing from my fly on the wall perspective.
I’ve ventured into a middle-ground approach, but I haven’t really nailed it down yet.
For my longer works, I need more structure to keep from going off on gigantic tangents.
Unlike the hardcore planners, I’m looking at waypoints rather than explicit step-by-step instructions.
This is not unlike my pick a concept and go approach. The main difference is that the go portion is constrained by the number of days from Thanksgiving to Epiphany.
In an extended series like The Sentinels, instead of a fixed number of days in the holiday season, I need to pick another fixed point in the story to serve as a distinct waypoint.
To some, this would appear to be planning or at least rough sketching. “Real Planners” aren’t so loosey goosey. They know exactly how it will all play out, beat by beat.
That works for them. I’m not sure it would work for me. I’m fine rough sketching between the waypoints.
I don’t have an exact plan or expectation of where the noodles will flow when I stir my soup. I don’t honestly care.
What I did learn from playing the aqua ring game was that the focus and time required to get all the rings on the spikes was rarely worth the effort.
Sure, you could feel accomplished about having completed the challenge, but you look up and it’s five minutes until dinnertime and you’ve missed that Dracula knock-off you were going to watch on UHF.
If that works for you, great. You do you. For now, I need to journey through the story in Flow State and watch it unfold.
That’s all for this soup-worthy Hump 🐫 Day. I wish you comfort and comfort food to see you to the end of the week.