10/23/06 | Leftovers: Udon
[ Currently Eating: Toast ]
I can’t remember if I’ve already had a Udon Noodle leftovers post. But in any case it’s worth revisiting again because it’s one of my favorite type of leftovers. The basic idea is to use up any sort of “meat-ish” leftovers from the day before, including but not limited to fried and roast chicken, fish cutlets, roast pork, hardboiled eggs, lunchmeat, sliced up steak, mixed veggies. You boil up some udon (or soba, ramen, chinese white noodles or even spaghettini) and make some sort of clear stock consisting mainly of water, sweet mirin wine, soy sauce and instant hon-dashi (fish broth powder – a subsitute for the more authentic way which involves dried kelp and katsuo fish flakes).
You plop the noodles in a bowl pour the sauce over it and arrange the cut-up leftovers on the top. In this case, I actually didn’t have the meaty leftovers, so I used turkey lunchmeat and fried up some mushrooms. I also usually make an egg pancake (an “empty” omlette) and chop that up and add some green onion. Sometimes I put some pickled red ginger on the top for color too.
Funny, there turned out to be so much topping that you can’t even see the udon noodles underneath! Another favorite thing to do is use leftover pork or chicken curry from the night before as the broth. You can thin out the curry with a bit of chicken stock or water. Add the cooked noodles and you’ve got curry udon.
October 24th, 2006 at 7:40 am
mmm, I love this, cheap, throw anything in, and it always tasts great!
October 26th, 2006 at 9:15 pm
That looks delicious. I have little pre-made packs of udon soup that I buy for when the cafeteria is serving something gross–but, honestly, I’d love to make my own. I’ve never seen the noodles in my local grocery store, though.
Nothing’s better than throwing a bunch of random food into a pot full of bubbling broth. I make my best chicken soups that way. Spinach leaves + spinach egg noodles + a can of chicken + half a carton of chicken stock = amazing soup, mmm.
October 28th, 2006 at 9:38 am
yummyyum – yep, yummy!
eb – ah, the anything in a pot soup. Back in college, we used to make an enormous pot of Everything Soup during finals week, starting Sunday night. It usually lasted until about wed or thurs… we just kept adding water and stock and whatever was in the fridge. But by the end, it was sort of sludgy…
October 29th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
wow that does look yummy and so simple!! btw, you should make a post about ramen and dressing it up! hehe. we used to add sliced beef, tomatoes, spinach, etc to our ramen…so tasty and cheap!
December 25th, 2006 at 10:22 pm
sounds great.
I have a jones for Kikkoman Memmi Soup Base, which tastes completely different depending on how much you add. trop in lime juice or chili oil or sesame oil and you get many different broths from one bottle of base. that and some udon and whatever else is hand – in it goes.