This is a photo of dinner! It’s Yaki-soba (yaki=fried, soba=noodle). I used to make this dish, minus all of the extras when I was poor and living in Japan. You could buy soba noodles (3 packages) for around $2.00, so this was a staple in my diet. I have found them since I’ve been home in the frozen food section of many Asian food stores and have made this meal (with the extras) hundreds of times for my family. It is one of their favorites. It can be made with any type of meat (or none at all), I usually use beef sliced thin and cooked with diced onion. Then I add whatever takes the longest to cook, broccoli, carrots, peppers, and more julienne onions. Then when they are getting close to being cooked, I add in the things that don’t need so long–mushrooms (rarely used), pea pods, bean sprouts and shredded cabbage. After all of my veggies and meat are cooked–I drop them into a bowl–add a cup of water to the wok and the three seasoning packets that come with my soba noodles. When that is boiling-I add three packages of soba and cook through (2 minutes-maybe) then I remove the noodles from the water and toss with the meat and veggies. In Japan, we squirted mayo over the top–yummy–but I’ve never done that here. It’s too sweet to mix it with soy sauce, but I do like salt and pepper on top.

If you were interested in making this for your family, you would want to find the frozen yaki-soba noodles by Maruchan–it looks like this:

And you can find it in most of the bigger Asian food stores. It’s mighty tasty–and a very healthy dinner packed full of protein and vegetables for your family. My kids love it–and one of my husband’s, the Chef, favorite dinners.