Like Phat, I appreciate a bit of olive oil in mine. I also like to add some sort of protein, possibly "appropriate" for the ramen flavor packet. This year I cooked up some ground beef and dried that along with some cans of chicken and vacuum sealed the results in several fairly small quantities, and store them in the freezer. Dried, vacuum sealed and stored in the freezer they last pretty well, so just once a season to do this work.

A fair chunk of dried ground beef in a beef flavored ramen along with a bit of olive oil makes this a massively nicer (and more like an actual) meal IMO. These are also good with Lipton/Knorr sides, and the result is about 1/3 the cost of a Mountain House or the like.

But after that much (even if just once per season) work I'm going to experiment this year with TVP .