"Four-colour" Udon Noodle Soup

This Udon Noodle soup with tomatoes, potatoes, beans and beef is very loosely based on the contents of a bowl of Biang Biang Mian, which I ate in Xi'An and loved to bits. Since I have never made pasta from scratch and I am crazy about Udon Noodles, I decided to combine these fast-cooking Japanese noodles with the ingredients I had been able to identify in the Chinese soup. These where most obviously the four above and you can take a look at the colourful result below.

Recipe For "Four-Colour" Udon Noodle Soup - Serves 2

1 potato
3 medium-sized Tomatoes
1/2 packet of trimmed green beans
2 garlic cloves
1 slice of ginger
3-4 dried chillies
1/2 packet of Beef Quick Cook Strips (Tesco; or any beef you like)
2 packets of Udon Noodles (to be found in Asian supermarkets)
1-2 vegetable stock cubes
A dash of Aromat (optional)
2 spring onions

Step by Step Instructions

• Soak the beef in soy sauce and 1 garlic clove, crushed and chopped and ginger.
• Cut up potato into little cubes (see image) and cook in salt water until done. You can see if they are done by poking them with a fork. If they slide off, they are good. 
• Boil some water and pour it over the tomatoes, so you can easily peel off the skin. To make it even easier split the skin with a knife beforehand. After peeling them, cut them into quarters, take out the middle bit and cut the remaining tomato meat into cubes.
• Crush the garlic, cut it into slices. Add some oil to a pan and throw the garlic in with the chillies. Then add the green beans (this is one of my steps of making 干煸四季豆 Fried green beans with pork and gives the beans a lovely aroma). After frying, take them out of the pan.
• Fry the beef strips until done.
• Now for the soup; Very simply add some water to a pot (enough to cover the noodles) and get it cooking. Dissolve the vegetable stock cubes and add some Aromat (optional). Add the noodles and the cut-up spring onions and cook for four minutes. 
• After fishing the spring onions out of the pot, arrange the noodles in a dish and add all four ingredients neatly on each side (only of you want to). Pour the broth into the bowl until it becomes visible. Drape the spring onions on top.
• Bon appetit!

To keep all the different ingredients warm during the cooking process, make sure you cover them up!

Cooking all the single ingredients takes some time, but therefore it is all very simple to do.