Quick

This light and flavorful noodle dish is one of my favorites. We use a lot of Asian ingredients at my Chicago restaurant, foods I shop for myself at the local Asian market. The best part of those trips is the Vietnamese place next door, where I stop regularly, shopping bags in hand, for a delicious bowl of pho before heading back to my kitchen. Lightly dipping the beef in broth to cook it, as I describe below, is referred to as “shabu-shabu” in Japan.

This dish was inspired by Korean cooking, which is extremely popular in Japan. With a hearty and spicy broth, it’s perfect for wintertime, when crabs are at their peak flavor. I like to serve this dish in individual Asian hot pot dishes, but you can also combine this recipe into one big pot and ladle into bowls. If you’re using live crabs, be sure to remove the head, gills, and tough outer shells before cooking.

I tasted an unforgettable version of this dish on a trip to Thailand a few years ago, in the city of Chiang Mai, which is famous for its vibrant Thai curries. I love the mixture of aromatic flavors and textures here, and the way this dish is sweet, pungent, and spicy all at once. If you can find them, use Thai eggplants, which are a pale green in color, and have a nice, delicate flavor. Or you can substitute slender Chinese eggplants. This dish has a lot of ingredients but is very straightforward and easy to prepare.

Although somen is typically a summertime food, here’s a delicious, fragrant dish you can enjoy year-round. I love cooking with traditional clay pots, which add a nice homey touch. They also keep food warm and, best of all, make a dramatic presentation—especially when you lift the lid to release this dish’s seductive aroma. You can find these vessels (called “donabe” in Japanese) in Asian markets, or you can substitute a Dutch oven or any sturdy pot with a lid (enamel or cast-iron pots work great). If you’re using a pot, combine all the servings and set the pot, covered, on a heatproof dish on your dining table. Remove the lid with a flourish and ladle into bowls. You’ll see that I call for an udon broth for this recipe. So why not udon noodles? Chicken and eggplant are lighter foods that perfectly complement the lighter somen noodle, while the udon broth adds body and flavor to this hot dish. I use violet-colored Chinese eggplants, which are about the size of zucchini and cook quicker than the larger, more common varieties.

Here is an elegant summertime recipe that you can pull together quickly, with minimum time at the stove. You can use fresh or canned crabmeat, and fresh or frozen shrimp and squid. My local supermarket sells frozen squid that has already been cleaned, which is what I use when I cook this dish at home. The sweetness of the seafood in this recipe pairs nicely with the tomato dipping sauce, while the arugula adds a nice contrasting zing.

The daikon and cucumber in this recipe are perfect for summertime: cooling, crunchy, and fresh tasting. The mitsuba, an herb that has a wonderful, delicate flavor that’s a bit like chervil, adds another refreshing note and doesn’t overpower. Add tangy yuzu and rich salmon and you have a balanced, nutritious, and delicious dish you can knock out in 15 minutes, from start to finish. If you’d like, you can substitute canned salmon for the fillets and avoid firing up the oven altogether.

This recipe is for somen at its most elementary: a simple but sublime combination of noodles accented with a mixture of aromatic garnishes. You can layer other ingredients in this dish if you’d like, too, such as steamed and cooled spinach, fava beans or sugar snap peas, or thinly sliced raw carrots (find the freshest carrots you can, especially from your garden or farmers’ market). Just add it to the garnish dish. Cooling the broth in a metal container, as I recommend below, will help the liquid chill faster.

In Japan, this udon is a rich and comforting wintertime favorite, and it is especially popular with young people. And not only in Japan. Here in Chicago, it’s one of my son’s favorites. He plays ice hockey in school, and when he comes home after practice he’s ravenous. Niku udon to the rescue, every time.

Here’s one for the grown-ups. In Japan, we usually don’t drink sake or beer without a salty or spicy dish to tickle the palate. This udon is both salty and spicy, and is a perfect complement to your favorite beverage. The poached egg yolk in the dish adds a satisfying richness to the broth.

This dish is perfect for anyone with a hearty appetite. In Japan, it’s especially popular with teenagers, who devour large plates of these satisfying and filling fried noodles. Yaki udon is also a staple of Japan’s izakaya, or eating pubs, especially as a late night snack or complement to a frosty mug of beer. This recipe works best in servings of two. If you’d like to make it for four people, just prepare the dish in two batches.

Winter is the best season to enjoy this dish, when crab is at its most flavorful. I love serving these noodles in individual clay pots, which are such an intimate and satisfying way to enjoy a meal. These vessels become very hot when you cook in them, though, so be careful when you remove them from the burners. If you don’t have a clay pot, you can use other vessels, too. (See the discussion on clay pots in the recipce for Somen in a Clay Pot with Chicken and Eggplant, page 90, for more information.) Timing is very important for this dish to cook correctly, so make sure you have your game plan ready before you start.

Everyone in Japan knows ja-ja-men, with its spicy miso and garlicky flavors. Think of it as the Japanese version of spaghetti and Bolognese sauce, a favorite at home and casual restaurants. This may sound counterintultive, but I love eating this dish on a hot summer day—its spices reenergize me.

My kids can’t get enough of the savory and sweet flavor of this dish, which makes me smile because I still remember the moment I first tasted kitsune udon—in elementary school. Back in Japan, my grade school served meals to its students, and these noodles were one of my favorite lunchtime treats. I know both you and your kids will love them, too: they’re easy to prepare and the sweet and tangy flavor lasts and lasts.

Su means “plain” in Japanese, which is how this dish got its name. But plain doesn’t mean boring—this is a simple and light dish that I love when I want to enjoy the chewy texture of udon noodles without eating anything too heavy. Wakame is a nutritious seaweed that’s found in many Japanese dishes. You can include spinach in this recipe, too, if you’d like. Just quickly blanch the spinach in boiling water, cool in an ice bath, and drain before adding to the individual bowls.

Japanese curry? Actually, curry has been a part of Japanese cuisine for more than a hundred years. The Japanese navy adopted it in the nineteenth century from their British counterparts, who ate it on ships. Soon, eating curry on Friday became a Japanese naval tradition. And not just for sailors. Japanese citizens fell in love with curry, too, especially kids. I should know—I was one of them. When I was growing up, I was crazy about curry. Now my own kids adore it, especially in this dish. You can use any cut of beef that you like. If you want to go upscale, try rib eye, but even beef scraps work just fine.

While the underlying dashi is the same, udon broth is not as strongly flavored as soba broth because these wheat flour noodles absorb liquid easier than do the hard buckwheat of soba. You can freeze this broth for up to a month or keep in the refrigerator for up to a week and use for a number of dishes, which is what we do at my home because my family is crazy for udon!

You can whip up these fast and easy noodles in 15 minutes. They’re a typical lunchtime dish in Japan, and the hot soba and broth are especially comforting on a frigid winter day. If you have any leftover chicken, pork, shrimp, or grilled fish in the refrigerator, you can easily add them to this dish, if you’d like. Be sure to shred the chicken or pork. You can also try this soba with cubed firm tofu, which complements the garnishes nicely.

Yakisoba is an extremely popular casual dish in Japan, especially with kids. During the country’s annual summer festivals you can always find yakisoba stands crowded next to shrines and temples, ready to feed hungry visitors. Traditionally, this dish is prepared with pork loin or pork belly, but I think it tastes really wonderful with beef. Also, I prefer to use dried ramen noodles rather than frozen because they stay al dente when added to the stir-fry.

Spice alert: this ramen is guaranteed to make you sweat. These snappy noodles are very popular in Japan, even in the summer—some people, I guess, don’t find our sultry and humid hot season sticky enough! I, for one, prefer this ramen in the winter, because its rich pork and miso broth is warm and comforting.

In this hearty ramen, stir-fried vegetables are combined with seafood and pork to create a rich, filling dish with lots of flavors and textures. When I was growing up, this was one of my favorite foods after baseball practice—the noodles refueled me quickly, and deliciously, and helped me stave off hunger until dinnertime. These days, it’s the perfect antidote to a gray, frigid winter day.