My New Friend Maggi

I would like to introduce you to my new friend, Maggi. As you can see from her label, she is both hot and sweet. I like her a lot. My neighbor gets the credit for introducing us. She picked her up at the Indian grocery on a whim, and then decided she was too sweet. So she gave the bottle to us.

It's true, this tomato chilli (Indian spelling) sauce is very sweet. If you've ever tried Indian sweets, you understand. From what I can tell, for a sweet to be authentically Indian, you need to actually be able to feel the cavities forming in your teeth as you chew. Not that this has ever stopped me from eating them. But in this instance the sweetness is balanced by an equally intense spiciness, kind of like sriracha mixed with ketchup, but sweeter and thinner. Though I suppose you could just mix ketchup and sriracha, and accept that it's not exactly right. (My husband already does this when he eats French fries, because everything has to be spicy. Or if he's in a restaurant with no sriracha, he adds several tiny packets of pepper to the ketchup.)

My husband and I tried a little Maggi on our scrambled eggs the other day, and thought it worked pretty well. Though you would probably only think this if you already like to put ketchup on your scrambled eggs. Some people find that disgusting, which I understand, but I happen to like it.

The other thing I tried that worked even better was introducing Maggi to soy sauce. I used a dark, mushroom flavored soy sauce, which I think worked especially well against the lightness of the Maggi sauce. I mixed them both, diluted with water just a bit, added a little salt, and added the mixture to some flat Chinese wheat noodles, along with some kimchi (homemade and super easy – post is forthcoming) and some broiled tofu. Good stuff. Maggi and soy sauce are going to be hanging out together again real soon.