Yakisoba--Farm Fresh Feast Style (Quick Take)

Recipe for vegetables and meat tossed with noodles and sauce for a kid friendly Japanese dish.

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If you wander through an outdoor festival in Japan, you can see women fixing a delicious stir fried noodle dish, yakisoba, on giant flat griddles.  Because of these unwitting cooking demonstrations, yakisoba is one of the Japanese dishes I'm comfortable making.

I stock up on yakisoba noodle packs when I am near an Asian market.  In Hawaii I could get them fresh, but here in Ohio I get them in the frozen section of the Asian market down the street from hockey in Cincinnati.  Don't ask. I don't usually arrange my children's sports around my food shopping, it just works out that way. :)

I originally had celery in here, but decided there was enough crunch with the Bok Choy and Daikon.

I'm pretty sure my kids developed a taste for it in utero, because they have loved it from the chicken nugget age.  When I get the right mix of veggies in the farm share (some sort of cabbage, carrots, celery or pepper, and onion) it is their lunch of choice.  Yes, my kids come home from school for lunch.  At least my son is easily persuaded to join us if yakisoba is on the menu.  Oh!  Because it's Japanese, give equal emphasis to each syllable:  yah-kee-so-bah.  Easy!

For more recipes using bok choy, please see my Bok Choy Recipes Collection. For more recipes using carrots, please see my Carrot Recipes collection. For more recipes using radishes, please see my Radish Recipes Collection. These collections are part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient, a resource for folks like me starting at the contents of a big box of fresh farm share vegetables and wondering how we're going to get the family to eat them. For more recipe ideas, follow me on Pinterest. For a peek at scenes of life, follow me on Instagram. For articles that caught my eye and epic failures because I have my share, follow me on Facebook. Want to know How to Use This Blog?

Apple Cider Forgot-The-Sugar Muffins

It's apple season!  I love having apples on hand because they store in my crisper longer than, say, berries.  I can toss them in smoothies, side dishes, or just slice them up with peanut butter for a snack.
I used to be very 'meh' about apples, thinking they mostly tasted the same, until I got my first CSA farm share apples from the Shenandoah valley.  Whoa!  What a taste revelation!  The best variety was Larry (I am not making this up) and I'd pay good money to bite into a Larry apple again.  One of the things I miss the most about that first farm share.

These muffins I kind of threw together for an after school snack while I was gathering ingredients for dinner and doing laundry and plotting out the afternoon drive schedule and a bunch of other things.

So I forgot the sugar.

I didn't even notice until I bit into one, and thought 'hey, this isn't really sweet' but when my daughter grabbed the wild violet jelly and I grabbed the apple butter to slather on top, I didn't miss it at all. I mean, with a shake of cinnamon sugar on top, and apple cider for the liquid, they are sweet enough. If you are a person watching your sugar intake-try these!  If you're not, try them with jam or apple butter.

Caramelized Onion, Fresh Pear, Goat Cheese and Sausage Pizza (Pizza Night!)

I love fruit and cheese plates.  So does my daughter--I still remember when as a kindergartener she ordered one as an appetizer.  So much for encouraging independence!  The bill!
The pairing of fresh pears and goat cheese is classic, and I had so much fun making this pear pizza, but you know there was another half of the pig pear left when I finished.  Since I'd had a hard time deciding between a sweet and a savory base for that pizza, I made the combination again and this time did it savory using a mess of caramelized onions that I'd made in the crock pot.  I also brought in my trusty guest photographer to make artistic 'action' shots.  Because it's Friday Night Pizza Night!

Even though both pizzas had the same type of dough base, and 2 of the same toppings, the results were completely different.  And delicious.  I threw a bit of sausage (from part of a leftover breakfast sausage patty) onto this, but you could leave it off if you desire.  I've loved fruit on savory pizzas since I lived in Germany, and now I'm looking around to see what else I could put on a pizza.  Grapes on a chicken pizza fennel focaccia?  Apples, bacon and cheddar? Peaches and pepperoni? What do you think? Check out my Visual Pizza Recipe Index for all of the pizza doughs, fruit pizzas, meat pizzas, and vegetarian pizzas I share each week on the blog.