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Future rock star, hall of famer, pizza eater.

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We Won’t Forget About You, Bun

For a few years, our favorite dinner-leftovers-for-lunch meal has been bun, the tasty Vietnamese noodle dish with fresh vegetables and herbs, cellophane noodles, and grilled shrimp or chicken. It’s fresh tasting, flavorful, spicy, tangy, a little sweet, and lots of of great textures. We’ve made it probably a hundred times, and we never get sick of it. Sometimes, though, you need to change things up a bit. Using the same idea, same part of the world, but changing the country of origin, we’ve come up with a new favorite. Soba.

Soba are the Japanese buckwheat noodles, usually served cold with some sort of sesame dressing. Like bun, the majority of the dish is cold, with most of the prep work being chopping and mixing of the dressing. Not really happy with most of the recipes that I found online, I made up my own hybrid version. It starts with the noodles of course, about 2/3 lb. for four servings. Boiled until just tender and then shocked under cold water to stop the cooking. They’re dressed with a dressing made from 2 parts soy sauce, 1 part rice wine vinegar, 1 part sesame oil, and a little sugar, and a good handful of thinly sliced scallions. The vegetables in this dish are thinly julienned carrots and finely chopped Japanese cucumber, both pickled quickly in rice wine vinegar, sugar, and a little salt. They add a nice crunch and tanginess to the bowl. Keeping things on the light side, some lightly pan-fried tofu, cooked until just a little crispy and finished with some soy sauce, tops things off. A drizzle of chili sauce and a final sprinkling of toasted sesame seeds are there solely to get stuck in your teeth.

It’s a simple and quick recipe, but it packs some serious flavors and textures. You can tailor is to your own tastes, using whatever sort of vegetables or protein that you want. I think we’ll stick with this version for a while, or until we get sick of it and have to move on to another country.

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