Yakisoba and Poke Salad Kit from Suruki Supermarket - San Mateo

My posting schedule used to be two entries a week but lately due to time and budget constraints, it's been a struggle to do just one entry a week. But have no fear, the blog is not ending. I'm working on it.

This weekend's adventures in cooking included a trip (not literally) to Japan with some yakisoba and poki salad. I am intrigued by this cooking channel on youtube, Cooking With Dog, and have been meaning to try out the recipes but having no experience in cooking Japanese food, I waited for the simplest and tastiest recipe. Yakisoba was my answer.

We went to the Japanese market to pick up the ingredients.

Working from memory, I tried to list out the ingredients and their prices. We didn't really have time to comparison shop and Japanese specialty markets can be pricy so keep in mind, if you try this dish, you can get chicken/beef/pork for much cheaper and in larger quantity than pictured above. Also, after tasting the Tokyo negi, I learned that it tastes just like regular green onion, slightly less potent, so next time I can use regular green onions for a cheaper price. The sesame oil and carrots are leftover from our Korean night. I followed the directions per the video above except replacing pork with chicken and here is the end result:

Ta-da! It doesn't look too bad if I do say so myself. It tasted delicious also and was simple to make.

I'm not sure why Picasa wouldn't let me rotate this picture. Our side dish to the noodles was poki salad. The Japanese market we frequent has a 50% deal after 6:10PM everyday. Everyone lines up before 6:10PM and right when they open the sushi section, it's a crazy mad dash through lines of feisty Asian moms and families to pick what's left of the sushi. We managed to get our hands on two of these poki salad dishes. ($2.48 after discount)

($2) Tobiko - salted salmon roe. I like to combine salmon roe into my poki salad and sadly, this was not half off so we paid the full $2 for a mere 0.10 lbs.

The poki salad dish comes with tuna, onions, a little lettuce, some seaweed salad, and a container of sauce. I like to try and stretch the dish to be more filling by tearing some iceberg lettuce and mixing it in with the poki for a more filling salad. Poki can also be too much tuna at one time if I don't balance it out with the lettuce this way.

Rounding out the meal is another half off dish, California rolls. Original price $5.95, we paid $2.98.

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS
We spent a total of $25 at the market. This equated to dinner for 2, lunch for 2, and another meal for 1, so a total of 5 meals. Each meal included California roll, poki salad, and yakisoba although after the first dinner, we ran out of chicken. I am definitely going to make Japanese food again. I will definitely use recipes from cookingwithdog again. And of course, I will continue to go to Suruki's Supermarket for the half off sushi as I have been. My only advice is to not buy chicken from the Japanese market for that monstrous price. But it's ok, we were on a time crunch.

Items purchased at Suruki's Supermarket.