Japanese Noodle Soup, the end

This is just the kind of recipe I hate. I’ve been cooking for 3 days. Now granted you could do it in one day, if you had nothing else to do. I felt it would work out wonderfully as I wanted to work on my painting on Friday and go to the Baltimore Craft Show on Saturday. So you have read phases 1 and 2 to see the parts I did each of those days. Today, I went to a Pampered Chef Party. It’s the new Tupperware party. It is also the end of the month so I had bills to pay before leaving.


I arrived back home at about 4:30 PM. I pealed and organized all the vegetables and fed the dog. Here is the finale of the dish.

2C, 1/2” cubes, peeled yam

5 oz. snow peas

4C, ½” wide crosswise slices cored Napa cabbage

5 oz. slender carrots

10 oz. Udon noodles

1C sliced green onions

¼ C matchstick-sized strips peeled fresh ginger

6 oz.firm Tofu, cut into 1/2 “cubes

Bring a pot of boiling salted water to a boil. Have bowls ready for each of the 4 vegetables and also the noodles. Remember the sliced mushrooms from last night and get them out of the refrigerator. After the salted water comes to a boil, cook the yams, 5 min. Remove and place in a bowl each veg. as you cook it. (Next the snow peas, 30 sec; cabbage, 1 ½ min., and the carrots 2 minutes) Bring the reserved cooking liquid to a simmer and add the green onions, matchstick ginger, salt and pepper. Finally cook the Udon noodles in the salted cooking water. Drain and place in a bowl.

When ready to serve, place 1/4th of all the ingredients in a bowl and spoon the hot broth over. If you need more salt, add soy sauce. I thought it needed some pizzazz. I added Sambal Oelek which is a hot sauce; very wrong. We used chop sticks, Chinese soup spoons and bowls to make it more festive.

Bottom line, if you want to make a Japanese Noodle dish, uses a Japanese Cookbook. Jim ate it and said he liked it, but felt it took a lot of work to eat. That is his way of saying, don’t make this again. I would attach the word boring. Unfortunately we have left over’s.  I am going to look through a hot pot book that I have to figure out a way to make it better.  It seemed the perfect vegetarian meal or for meatless lent days.  I will nto be serving it tomorrow, but stay tuned to see how I fix it. 

A 2007 Robert Mondavi Pinot Noir was a good accompaniment to this dinner assuming you did not put hot sauce on the dish. Jim did not use the hot sauce.