Vifon "Asian Style Instant Noodle with Tomato Sauce"

Brand: Vifon (Fine Food)
Flavour: Asian Style Instant Noodle with Tomato Sauce
Format: foam bowl
Packets: three
Identifiables: noodle brick, veggie bits, slightly green-yellow oil
Sodium: 1.22 grams

I was hoping for something spicy. I was also hoping for a bit of a scare, which is fortunate because in this I avoided total disappointment.

The package says a lot of things, and some of them are in a language I'm not quite sure how to type out even with the help of a Unicode character map. (The Greeks, upon giving written language to the Russians, made up a bunch of funny-looking letters. The French, upon giving written language to the Vietnamese, used normal letters with a glut of accent marks. I think Cyrillic letters look way cooler.) One of those bits of text reads, "Serving Dry". I still have no idea what they're on about. I thought perhaps this meant that one drained the noodles then mixed in dry pwder to form a sauce, but no....

First things first. The disc-shaped noodle brick did not fit properly into the oblong tray. The veggie packet was obvious, but the others were labelled "Flavoring OIL" (with a cheerful star above the 'I' in 'OIL') and "Soup Base". I could tell from the feel of it that the latter was liquid-filled, which filled me with gentle dread. I boiled some water, poured it over the noodles and veggies in the foam bowl, then covered it with a flimsy plastic lid which bore a semi-circular cut at one corner. Ah, to drain the noodles! How elegant, yes?

Three minutes later, it turned out to be only somewhat elegant. The noodles quickly wedged themselves in the pseudo-spout, meaning the excess water drained rather slowly and incompletely. Also, the lid warped amusingly during this process, and I worried that it might pop off and spill noodles into my sink. That didn't happen, so I peeled the lid off at the table and poured the oil in.

Then, it came time to open the soup base. I had to use scissors; there was a helpful zigzaggy edge (what should I call that?) but the packet was too strong to be torn open safely that way. What came out once it was opened looked and smelled for all the world like cheap steak sauce, dark brown and runny and sweet. I began to wonder if a mistake had been made at the factory.

I stirred all of this together with the helpfully included fork (bonus points), snapped a photo, and then took my first bite. It wasn't spicy at all, but instead had a curious sweet-sour tomatoey thing going on that was... uninspiring. I hate to say it, but for all the quirkiness involved in the packaging, it really just ended up being slightly unusual noodles, and only very slightly. Come on, Vifon! I can't fill a blog with stories of boring ramen!

Numbers: packaging 4, preparation 3, heat 1, flavour 3, overall 3

Music: Journey - Time3 - Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)