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Welcome to: Cooking with Ara A little backstory before we begin! In the last month, I've once again moved away from the home of my mother and into an apartment where I continue my life as an indebted university student. During this month, I've attempted to live extremely frugally, which makes me kind of happy but has been the result of 80% of my meals being spaghetti, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, peanut butter and anything anythings, cereal, and four pounds of shelled peanuts. Needless to say, it's been a little rough, so I'm looking to expand my culinary repertoire, even if it costs me some money and time. And what better a way than by making interesting food myself!? And you should help me. I want you guys to give me some recipes. Exotic is good. Tasty is good. You know what's good! So, if you post a recipe that I think I'll enjoy, I'd love to spend some time and effort trying my best at making it. I could do it like a blog and post pictures of the process and the final product and talk about what I thought about it and rate/review it. I could do whatever we want! Are you picking up what I'm layin' down? Note: I have extremely mediocre cooking skills, but a willingness to eat many a botched recipe regardless. Hunger is the best of spices, they say! So I'll try my best, but we'll see where the wind blows us. So, I guess I'll let popularity see whether or not the community has any interest in this. Any recipes you've always kind of wanted to try but never got around to? Any weird dishes that would require a trip to an Asian foods market? Dishes you simply want to see someone make? Tell me about 'em! Help me to be a true culinary king and engage with me in the process! My preference is main dishes over deserts Let the journey begin? Cook Number: The First Yakisoba dedicated to Mr Meogii http://allrecipes.com/recipe/chicken-yakisoba/ On this lovely, wet and cold Friday night, I made the first meal that I'm going to show you. This one was one that I had been planning for a long time, and had the ingredients for! After this, it'll be up to you guys to keep the suggestions spicy. From what I can gather, yakisoba is a noodle dish often sold at festivals as a sort of cheap and simple-ish pseudo-fried-food type meal. Meaning that the cooks probably just throw a ton of stuff together and cook it over noodles. The meat type and content varies, but I chose to cook chicken yakisoba because I very much enjoy the taste of chicken and it's a wonderful meat to fry. Anyway, it's supposed to be easy to cook, simple, and tasty! I dont have a very good track records with ethnic foods because my tastes tend to be conservative and bland, but that's something that really makes me click with what I hear about Japanese food: That it focuses on mild flavors that hide subtle qualities. I havent been to Japan, and almost all the Japanese food I have gone out to eat is sushi, so I'll give it some time before I say for certain that I like Japanese food, but it's definitely one of the only regions of the world where I would probably have a great time eating authentic food. Personal tastes, cultural tastes, and tangents aside, yakisoba is neither subtle nor mild, so let's have some fun! As seen above, I gathered all my ingredients, about ten in total. I readied a few more knives than I probably needed (3). I cut the cabbage head in half, and then sliced it in quarter-half inch wide slices of varying lengths (2-4 inches~). I also cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces and minced two cloves of garlic for my first time ever. I also had some water boiling for my noodles. I used soba buckwheat noodles. They are kind of brown-ish gray and much more porous than the usual flour noodles I cook for spaghetti all the time. Muuuch more porous, I wish I had a picture of the pot after my pound and a half of soba noodles had cooked. They had soaked up more than half a gallon of water and filled the entire pot! It was absurd. And because of those properties, they are also less sturdy than my spaghetti noodles, so you had to treat them somewhat delicately or they would mash. Meanwhile at station 2, I was setting up the (giant) frying pan for the rest of the ingredients. First up is to cook the chicken and garlic, then add the chili paste and half a cup (so much!) soy sauce to the mixture while cooking on med/high temp. I cooked it about four times as long as the recipe called for because i was worried about the chicken not cooking through, and wanted to cook more soy sauce out of the mixture before I put that part aside. But after fifteen minutes, I had myself a nice looking chicken and sauce combo: After emptying this mixture into a holding container, I rinsed and reused my big pan for part two: the variety! Here is where I fry the cabbage, carrots, onions, and add a lot of salt! So I turned the heat back on, added the cabbage, and then decided that the pieces were too big. I'm not proud of this exactly, but I decided that it would be best to just try to cut the cabbage while it was frying... so um yea, didn't work. But the important thing is that it didnt *not* work horribly! Thumbs up for valuable life experiences! And then I had trouble cutting the carrots into matchsticks, because I forgot that I had to cut anything other than the cabbage, so I was hurriedly trying to cut the carrots and add them to the pan before the cabbage cooked through too much! The idea is to cook the cabbage and carrots and onions (which I likewise forgot until the end) until they are soft and wilty. And I also forgot the salt. But I managed to add all of these things over time as the cabbage cooked and it actually turned out quite fantastic. Apparently it's quite hard to overcook cabbage, who knew. Side note: cabbage friend in oil with salt is actually very tasty. My friend took a bite of a piece and said that it tasted like pickled cabbage or something, and also that it was very good despite him not liking cabbage. I like cabbage both ways, so... ^^ When that finished cooking, I added the chicken mixture to the heat and mixed it all together. Add a pound of soba noodles and cook until it's all nice and warm! And that was that! The recipe lists 35 minutes as the total cook time, given the noodles have already been cooked. It took me just under two hours from start to finish, counting 45-60 minutes of noodle cooking (very weak heaters take over half an hour to boil a pot of water x.x). I cooked everything at least twice as long as they suggested, generally more like 5 times longer, but it somehow still turned out well. Probably since I tried to rely more on my common sense than the recipe. Either way, I got some sassy comments from my friends, whom I invited to hang out while I cooked, about how I took forever. Which is true: I learned today that I am very casual in the kitchen. But I enjoyed it a lot and dont regret spending a lot of the time doing silly things and having fun with it. The final product? As a whole I really enjoyed the yakisoba. Making it was fun and I can imagine it would get faster and faster over time. It's easy to cook in bulk and quite inexpensive, so it's perfect for the good ol' college lifestyle. As far as taste goes, on a scale from hate to love, 0 to 10, I'd give it a strong 9! I really do like it a lot, but there are some things I would change. The only other time I've tried to make yakisoba, many months ago, I used udon noodles (kind of defeats the whole idea of soba I guess) and rice wine. I really really liked it that way, but I'd have to say that this yakisoba is fundamentally different, through the use of chili paste instead of vaporized wine to create the primary taste (the secondary being the materials and the soy sauce). That said, I'd probably use udon noodles next time, because I love them so much. Honestly, while I do like these soba noodles, I can't get those udon noodles out of my head. They are the best noodles I have ever had. Cooked with so much salt~ mmmm. This dish has the pleasure of being somewhat spicy, which is very appealing to me, while the rice wine version had no such spice. I'd recommend this recipe to almost anyone, including cooksmiths as inept and silly in the kitchen as myself! And finally, a big thanks to everyone who posted in this thread and made me feel valued and squiggly inside. I hope you enjoyed reading this at least a little. I'll try to work on adding more of a story-like flare to them as I continue to be under your care. u.u