Thin White Line celebrates the noodles of Seattle.  A few months back, I

Published 8:00 am Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Thin White Line celebrates the noodles of Seattle.A few months back, I put myself on the austerity plan to save up for a trip. While scheming on ways to save money, it hit me: time to revisit ramen. I haven’t eaten instant noodles since my college years, when I burned out on spicy kimchi ramen and black-bean sauce noodle.Instant ramen has a noble past, after all: Momofuku Ando invented it in 1958 to overcome food shortages and promote world peace. (“Peace will come to the world when the people have enough to eat,” he’s credited with saying.)Now that I’ve moved far away from St. Paul’s only Korean market, I prowled the noodle aisle at my go-to Asian market in Seattle, the Viet Wah superstore on MLK, with its comfortingly familiar smells of dried fish and mysteriously fermented things. Among the Korean and Southeast Asian instant noodles I picked up was this 39-cent packet of Indomie mi goreng satay, which became my favorite.Now, the mi goreng satay has several qualities I value in an instant noodle: five packets to stir together or sprinkle over top (including one called “bumbu sauce”), so it’s possible to pretend to actually cook; a sauce rather than a broth, so the noodles taste like more than artificial beef flavor; and a hefty dose of MSG, the bacon of the poor. When prepared, the instant mi goreng tastes sweet-salty, with a whiff of peanuts and whomp of kaffir lime, followed by a kick — I only add half the chile packet, and still sweat a little — and makes a great accompaniment to steamed broccoli. You could eat three bowls of the stuff for the price of a cup of coffee. World peace may not ensue, but there’s nothing so peaceful as a carb nap.