Have You Done Udon?

Tagliatelle Asiatiche Udon con Pollo & Verdure
Udon Noodles with Chicken & Vegetables 

I love Udon noodles, either in a steaming hot, spicy, lemon grass-infused broth, or in a pan-fried recipe like this one. I love the fact that they are very quickly cooked and that they have a wonderfully silky-smooth texture. You're not familiar with them? Well you had better try them out, 'cause you are missing out on something yummy if you don't!


To prepare this simple dish, I started out by slicing the chicken into bite-sized pieces and marinating it with sliced ginger, a little sesame oil, some lime juice and a little Sansho pepper to give it an unexpected kick. It is much better if you can do this in advance, but as this was a "spur of the moment" decision this evening, I had to make do with 20-30 minutes.

I cut the vegetables into slices- carrots, red cabbage, yellow and green peppers, spring onion and celery. Basically I used whatever I had at home- so you can vary when you get around to making your own version. So, now we are ready to go!

I started the water boiling for the noodles and in the meantime got my non-stick pan hot for the chicken. In went the noodles and in went the chicken and ginger.  After 1-2 minutes of cooking, add the rest of the vegetables to the noodles. They are not going to need more than 5 minutes total cooking time. so this will give the vegetables 3 minutes of pre-cooking, after which time you can turn off the heat.

Once the chicken is cooked, add the noodles and vegetables, a little sesame oil, some 5-spice powder, soy sauce, chili, honey and get stirring!

Whilst the noodles were finishing cooking, I toasted up some fresh sesame seeds to use as decoration. And I went about serving everything up! The noodles went into my bowl first, along with the rest of the ingredients and a few leaves of parsley. Cilantro would have been nicer, but the parsley added some freshness and went wonderfully with the chicken. A great finishing touch is to drizzle everything lightly with honey and to sprinkle with the toasted sesame seeds and a few tiny drops of additional sesame oil... delicious! Add a little more dried chili if you dare, (I did) and grab those chopsticks! It's time to eat!