pork and udon soup recipe and this week's meals

I haven't posted lately but I have been cooking - although nothing worth writing about, mostly old standbys like spaghetti, breakfast for dinner, or turkey tacos, etc. However, this weekend, I did manage to make a new recipe: pork and udon soup.

It's a meal that you need to make in two steps. I did it over two days.

Day one: I roasted the pork. Very easy but it required about 3.5 hours in the oven.
Day two: I chopped the veggies and threw the veggies and pork in broth to simmer for a half hour to make the soup. I also boiled the noodles separately. I didn't have any udon so I used somen and that worked fine.

Overall, I would say that the broth is not as rich or complex as ones made from scratch but the soup was very filling and good for about 40 minutes cooking time - much of that time was made up of leaving the soup to simmer on the stove rather than active time.  The soup seemed much less Japanese as the udon in the recipe would suggest but tasted more like pho especially since the recipe recommends garnishing with bean sprouts, cilantro, and lime. The toddler picked at it since she didn't like the look of the shitake, cabbage, or carrots, but she ate the noodles. The husband gave the soup an "A."

This week's meal plan (although I'm not sure I'll get around to cooking the sinigang):

• spinach and cheese lasagna rolls
• matzoh ball soup, latkes, and smoked salmon and mache salad (I made the soup last week but never got around to making the latkes during Hannukah)
• slow cooker beef and black bean chili
• sinigang na baboy (a pork and tamarind soup with napa cabbage, taro root, green beans, tomatoes, and onions)