My Tussle with “Chewy Soup Noodle” in Today’s Crossword
So, there I was this morning, with my usual cup of lukewarm coffee – because I always forget about it – and the daily crossword. I try to do one every day, you know, to keep the old cogs turning. Usually, I can make decent headway, but sometimes a clue just stops me in my tracks. Today, that clue was “chewy soup noodle.”
Sounds pretty straightforward, right? That’s what I thought at first. “Chewy soup noodle,” I muttered to myself. My brain immediately started flipping through its internal rolodex of noodle types.
The first thing that popped into my head was UDON. Big, thick, definitely chewy. And you always find udon in a soup. Seemed like a winner. I counted the letters. Four. Then I looked at the grid. The space I was trying to fill had five empty boxes. Drat. So, UDON was a no-go. It’s frustrating when your first good idea doesn’t fit the space.
Okay, plan B. What other noodles are famously chewy and live in soup? I let my mind wander. LO MEIN? Sometimes chewy, often in a sauce more than a soup, and it felt a bit off for a typical crossword answer for “soup noodle.” Plus, the letter count wasn’t always right, depending on how you count it with the space.
I thought about PHO noodles. Rice noodles. They’re in soup, but “chewy” isn’t the first word I’d use to describe them. Usually more soft or tender. So, I mentally crossed PHO off the list. This was getting a little annoying. Such a simple description, yet the answer was eluding me.
I decided to leave it for a bit. Sometimes, staring at a problem too long just makes it worse. I got up, refilled my coffee – promising myself I’d drink this one while it was hot – and tackled a few other clues around the stubborn “chewy soup noodle” one. My hope was that getting some of the crossing letters would give me a hint.
After a while, I managed to fill in a couple of words that intersected with my problem clue. This gave me some precious letters. I now had it looking like this: _ A _ E N. Five letters, with an ‘A’ as the second letter and an ‘E’ as the fourth, and an ‘N’ at the end.
This was a game-changer!
- UDON was definitely out.
- PHO wouldn’t fit that pattern.
- LO MEIN, also not fitting.
I went back to my initial list of common soup noodles. What five-letter word fits _ A _ E N and is a chewy soup noodle? Then it hit me, like a ton of bricks. RAMEN! R-A-M-E-N. It fit the letters perfectly. Ramen noodles, especially the good quality ones, have a wonderful chewy texture. And ramen is, by definition, a soup noodle dish. It was so obvious once I had those extra letters!
I carefully penciled it in. R. A. M. E. N. Stepped back, looked at it. Yes! It felt right. That little sigh of relief and satisfaction, that’s why I do these things. It’s not about being a genius, just about persistence and sometimes looking at the problem from a different angle, or with a bit more information.
So, “chewy soup noodle” turned out to be good old RAMEN. Funny how the brain works. Or doesn’t, until it gets a little nudge. Anyway, that was my little puzzling adventure for the morning. Made me a bit hungry for a bowl of ramen, to be honest. But first, on to the rest of the puzzle!
