Mercedes´ Dancing Soba

Mercedes is one of my favourite food bloggers – she also studied (and taught) macrobiotics at the Kushi Institute in Amsterdam, now she´s running her own cooking school in Almere in the Netherlands. I yet have to taste her fabulous dishes, but my mouth waters each time I read her inventive recipes which are usually influenced by her Caribbean roots 😀

Check out her dancing soba recipe!

I modified it slightly: Instead of soba noodles I used black rice noodles (made by the Terrasana company), for vegetables I used leek, garlic, carrot, green peas and young savoy cabbage, and I tweaked the ratios of the seasonings a bit (2 tbsp rice vinegar, 3 tbsp mirin and 2 1/2 tbsp tamari).

As a topping I made pan-fried cubes of dried tofu, which you first have to soak, then strain the liquid out (most of it, but not every drop, otherwise it soaks up a bit too much of the oil) and then fry it in a shallow layer of sesame oil until browned and slightly crispy.

Gorgeous looking and tasting soup….

Soba noodles with curried pumpkin sauce and tempeh crumble

Aaaaah, my favourite soba noodles! I have them so seldom, because they are so expensive! 😀 While I believe that nothing compares to authentic Japanese soba ( buckwheat and wheat or pure 100% buckwheat noodles), here in the Czech Republic I choose to substitute them with the cheaper local buckwheat pasta. I´m actually happy we have such a great buckwheat-product brand, not every country is so lucky! But here I used my long-saved stack of real soba, bought during our stay in Slovenia..

I made a sauce of long cooked cubed hokkaido pumpkin and onions – nearly cover the cubes with water and boil on low flame until soft. I seasoned the sauce with black Indian vulcanic salt and a generous amount of curry powder. I blended the sauce in a blender for a perfectly creamy texture.

On a pan I sauteed on oil a bunch of green beans, cut into tiny pieces, along with crumbled up tempeh and a splash of shoyu soy sauce.

Layer the bean/tempeh mixture and the pumpkin curry sauce over the noodles 🙂

Soba noodles with carrot-tofu sauce

Another supersimple sauce for your pasta is here, this time starring tofu and carrot!

It has exactly FOUR ingredients: tofu, carrot, ume plum vinegar and barley miso. First steam a chunk of tofu (about 50 g per person should suffice) and a small handful of carrot chunks in a steaming basket, about 20 minutes, or until the carrot gets soft enough to be easily prickled by a fork. Then transfer to blender, adding 1/2 tsp barley miso, about 2 tsp ume plum vinegar and warm water from the steaming (amount depends on desired consistency). Serve over noodles (mine were buckwheat noodles – soba) and garnish with cut up nori strips.

Glazed yuba again – this time with soba noodles

I already posted a recipe for glazed yuba on this blog, you can find it here. This time I made this one just for my boyfriend (except that I used half white flour and half whole-wheat flour for tempura batter, as he is not sensitive to gluten). For myself I made an oil-free and less-yin version 😀 I just soaked the yuba strips overnight, making sure they are fully covered by water, cut them up into bite-size pieces and then I cooked them in 1 tbsp of shoyu, 1 tbsp of mirin, 1/2 tbsp of lemon juice, 1/2 tbsp of rice malt (instead of maple syrup) and a bit of water, so the yuba was almost submerged. I first cooked the yuba for a while with a lid on and then let the liquid slowly evaporate with a lid off. It was almost as tasty as my boyfriend´s deep-fried version!

I served the yuba on soba noodles, with water-sauteed veggies (onion, leek, broccoli, carrot and cabbage).

Soba with shoyu bouillon

I had some leftover cooked soba noodles, so the next day I tossed them into a lovely simple shoyu bouillon…

Just cook water with a couple of inches of kombu seaweed, for about 10 minutes, after which you take the kombu out, cut it into small pieces and return back (or save for another project…). The same thing you do with dried shiitake mushrooms (cook, take out, chop up, return). From the beginning I also added a small amount of dried daikon (it expands a lot in the liquid). Season with 2 tablespoons, or to your liking, of shoyu, and before serving, allow the soba to warm up in the liquid. Slurp up!

I served the bouillon with cooked rice/hato mugi mix, water-sauteed and lightly salted leek and swiss chard, and lentils with cooked hokkaido pumpkin cubes and shoyu.

Soba noodles with scrambled tofu

Soba noodles are very pricey, but once in a while, totally worth it! I used to eat only 100% buckwheat soba (glutenfree, but also the most expensive ones), but now my system tolerates (wholemeal) glutinous grains better, especially in an alkaline environment. So I had 40% buckwheat soba (the rest is whole wheat). They already contain salt, so you just cook them in a large amount of water for 6 minutes (or per package instructions) and you get the best result if you cool them down twice during the cooking with a bit of cold water, so they stop boiling and then bring back to rapid boil. They come out nicely firm and not soggy at all.

We had them with scrambled tofu. I started with sauteeing a larger onion with a bit of wild garlic (totally optional, but it´s nice), then adding a pinch of salt and little chunks of carrot, green beans and celery stalk. When the veggies softened up, I crumbled in a 200 g block of firm tofu, added a tablespoon of shoyu (natural soy sauce) and between 1/4- 1/2 tablespoon of organic sugarfree mustard. Let sautee for another 5 minutes at least, so the flavours combine.

I also had a little serving of chickpeas (seasoned only with salt) and of hiziki seaweed (cooked for at least half an hour with some of its soaking water, sliced onion and shoyu to taste).  Cook the hiziki until the water evaporates 🙂