Yaki Something

I meant to make the yakisoba from 月刊少女野崎くん (Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun). Life had different plans.

Hi, mon anime amis! It’s Elyse, with your regularly scheduled anime food newsletter. This week, things went awry, but still turned out pretty delicious! What a cliffhanger! Hmm, I don’t think that’s the right word! Will I eventually figure it out? Read on!

What I watched: 月刊少女野崎くん (Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun)

If you are looking for a short, sweet, emotionally untethered series (because My Mister is currently sucking up all my feelings like a vampire), 月刊少女野崎くん (Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun) is the answer. I know, I know—it’s about another teenage girl at another high school meeting another teenage guy and everything taking a turn after that. It sounds like a rote anime plot except...the guy is secretly a prolific romance manga author! The show follows Chiyo Sakura, after she tries to confess her love for Umetarou Nozaki. Nozaki is the creator of a popular romance manga series, but goes by the pen name Sakiko Yumeno, and mistakes Sakura’s advance for admiration of his work. He ends up recruiting her to help him with his manga, to Sakura’s dismay (but at least she gets to hang out with her crush!). 

Despite Nozaki’s prowess with writing about high school romance, he’s a bit of a dud IRL. He’s completely clueless when it comes to Sakura and relies on his other classmates as inspiration for his manga. But that’s what makes this series so charming. Nozaki is the straight man in this comedy-romance, the calm, expressionless backdrop to the eccentric characters and unfurling relationships around him. He absorbs everyone’s drama like a sponge, or even creates it himself, like when he forces a friend to go on a date with his arch-nemesis or keeps his friends up late one night to get material for what a girls’ sleepover might entail...only to fall asleep. It’s fun to watch Nozaki shamelessly bumble his way through romance without actually experiencing it himself. How can someone so aware be so...unaware? Then I’m reminded of my own life, specifically a few days before winter break back in college. 

I remember standing in front of the library and texting my now-husband. My fingers were pink from the cold and trembling with nerves, but my heart was naive and full, with memories of us hanging out that semester, becoming closer, and hope for something more than friends. On my Samsung BlackJack (remember??), I punched in a message to him, telling him I would miss him during our month-long break. He replied, “OK.” Poor Sakura. Poor ME. I had my own Nozaki, as I’m sure many of you have—except this series makes that puppy love anguish way more entertaining. 

What I cooked: Yaki...udon

In the very last episode, Sakura, Nozaki, and their friends go to a natsumatsuri, a Japanese summer festival where people wear yukatas, watch fireworks, and eat yakisoba! The classmate Nozaki forces on a date orders yakisoba from one of the street food stalls, and in true anime fashion, it is glorious, a graceful tangle of chewy noodles, sliced onions, chopped cabbage, all shiny and slick. 

Yakisoba is quick, and this recipe from Naoko Moore should only take about 10 to 15 minutes. However, when you discover your yakisoba noodles are speckled with light blue mold, add another 10 minutes for a mini meltdown, followed by sullen chopping for five silently fuming minutes. Welcome to the drama of lunch last week that my poor husband had to endure. Thankfully, he was brave enough to break the perfectionist prison of shame and anger I had mentally confined myself in to suggest an alternative. “What about yaki udon?” Travis asked, thoughtfully, slowly, pointing to the packets hanging, undisturbed by mold, in the fridge.

The vegetables were already cut—shiitakes into coin-thin slivers, Napa into neat squares, garlic into near-translucent slices—so I mixed together the soy and oyster sauces. The dark mood still lingered and I couldn’t bring myself to bust out my donabe, so I stuck with a nonstick skillet. I drizzled in some sesame oil and sautéed the garlic and shiitakes until soft and limp, like my ego. Then I dropped in the cabbage for a few seconds and two fistfuls of bean sprouts. I laid two bricks of udon noodles on top of everything, poured some sake over it, placed a lid on top to cook for a few minutes. While the sake was cooking off, making everything a little sweet, I decided to really pull myself by my bootstraps and go to TOWN on the toppings: pickled ginger, razor-thin scallions, fat bonito flakes. 

The inner clouds began to part as I uncovered the skillet and plopped in the soy-oyster sauce and a bit of black pepper. Since the udon noodles are softer than soba, I didn’t cover the dish a second time like Naoko suggests. I just stirred everything together and nonchalantly let Travis know lunch was ready. We ate in silence, in front of our screens, and bumped into each other as we got seconds. Is this a meet-cute? Maybe here it doesn’t count because we’re already married, but it was just the weird, random, happy-making little thing I needed when it seemed like nothing was going right. Who knew yakisoba could be so dramatic, or that yaki udon could be so restorative?