One day, I stumbled across a recipe for "pot-cooked udon in miso soup" ("miso nikomi udon") in a Japanese cookbook. (Titled simply Japanese Cooking, by Emi Kazuko, published in 2002 by Hermes House, for those who care.) My first thought was, "Wow, this looks really good!" This was very quickly followed by, "Wow, this looks really hard!" So I never made it.
Now, if you know how to make dashi stock and happen to own things like fireproof clay pots, you might want to go buy this cookbook and try making real miso nikomi udon. It contains goodies like fresh shiitake mushrooms, chicken, scallions, and all sorts of wonderful things totally lacking from the recipe I offer below.
Anyway, I love miso soup and udon, so I found the idea of putting them together to be very appealing. I developed the following ridiculously simplified recipe, which very quickly became my basic "I don't feel much like cooking tonight but I can't afford to go out" meal.
Ingredients:
A note about instant miso soup. I practically live off this stuff. Just add hot water, and it's breakfast! Yay! There are many, many varieties of instant miso soup, and any of them will do for this recipe. Some of them have single serving sized packets with everything dried, including the miso. Others have two packets which go together, one having the miso in paste form and the other having all of the other ingredients dried. Either way is fine.
A note about udon. Udon are white wheat noodles. (As distinguished from soba, which are buckwheat noodles.) In cross section, udon are oval shaped. There are several varieties available. The type I use is nikomi udon. You should be able to find it "bundled," meaning that within the package, serving-sized bunches of udon will be banded together. This recipe uses one bundle.
Alrighty! Let's go!
First, boil a pot of water with some salt in it. If you're watching your salt intake, a little shake or two will do, or skip it altogether. I tend to dump at least a spoonful in. (I don't measure. I just open the carton and pour a little from the spout. This salt thing is a cooking habit I have from childhood and is not specific to this recipe. I do it anytime I boil anything in water.)
Put one serving-sized bundle of udon into the water. (Of course, remove the strip that binds it together first!) Boil for six minutes.
While the udon is boiling, heat some other water (with no salt) in a kettle, coffeepot, microwave, or however you like to heat water.
Put one serving of instant miso soup mix into a bowl, glass, or two-cup capacity measuring cup (my usual choice). Add about a cup of unsalted hot water. Stir well. This rehydrates your soup mix fully before you combine it with the udon.
When the udon is done boiling, dump it into a colander. Don't leave it there very long, or the noodles will start sticking together.
Put the udon into a one-quart pot and pour the hot miso soup over it. Add a little more (unsalted) water, if necessary, to cover the udon. Bring to a boil.
(To commit culinary sacrilege, add a sprinkling of French's Fried Onions at this stage, and stir them in. This is purely and utterly optional, of course.)
As soon as the soup is boiling, break an egg into into it. (Try not to break the yolk.) Do not stir! Boil for one minute, then remove from heat and cover.
This egg thing is a remnant of that other recipe which inspired me. That recipe says to let it sit for two minutes. To me, at the end of two minutes, the egg still looks pretty darn raw. If you like that, go for it. I tend to prefer my eggs hard boiled. I let the soup sit, covered, for ten minutes. That's long enough for the heat of the soup to cook the egg completely.
Observation: I usually have enough for two meals here. I make it for supper, and then I have the leftovers for breakfast. At some point I decided that I wanted an egg in my breakfast portion as well, so I started breaking two eggs into the soup. Two eggs do not get cooked as thoroughly in ten minutes as one does, so either let it sit longer or enjoy less-cooked eggs.
Eat and enjoy!