Healthy Soba Noodles

What foods do you crave when you’re busy?

I’ve recently moved house. You know what that means! Clearing the fridge and freezer.

Yup, we’ve been eating random bits and bobs to clear the fridge and then had about a week of getting takeaway and eating out. It’s been great, picking off all the places we want to eat at before we move BUT my body knows when it needs some nourishment aka some vegetables.

It was my second day in the new house and I needed something healthy, without needing a big load of groceries - I wasn’t ready for that yet!

So I decided to whip up my dad’s mentsuyu sauce and make soba noodles. You can get the recipe here.

This recipe was quick and easy, and I just needed to pick up a few deliciously green things to add to my noodles. I popped over to the Preston Market and was inspired by fresh peas and asian greens, so that’s what I used. But the beauty of this dish is that you can really …use whatever you have on hand, and it’ll come together into a comforting, healthy meal, that you can not only enjoy that day, but for lunch the day after!

Can you make this is large batches for big families or meal prep?

ABSOLUTELY.

Just increase the servings of soba noodles and grab extra handfuls of vegetables.

For the tofu, I generally go off about 150g protein choice per serve, so 1 small block of tofu serves 2. But you can just double that for more, or calculate the same portions for prawns, or chicken!

Yield: 2

Author: Cristina Chang

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Healthy Soba Noodles

A light and healthy soba noodle dish with a light soy broth and loaded with vegetables and tofu.

Prep time: 5 MinCook time: 23 MinTotal time: 28 Min

Ingredients

• 2 servings of soba noodles
• 1 bunch of asian greens, trimmed
• 2 handfuls of snow peas, trimmed
• 1 block of semi-firm fried tofu
• 1/3 cup of mentsuyu
• Garnish: sesame seeds, sliced nori and chopped spring onions

Instructions

1. Slice the tofu into 1cm pieces. Heat a fry pan up on medium heat and place the slices of tofu into the pan. Fry the tofu until it becomes nice and golden, this will take about 2-3 minutes, then flip. Once both sides of the tofu are nice and golden, add in 1 tablespoon of the mentsuyu and shimmy the pan around so the tofu starts to caramelise. Set this aside.
2. Cook the soba noodles using the package instructions and set it to the side. Save the boiled water.
3. Bring the water back to a boil and blanch your peas and greens.
4. Strain out all but 1 cup of the cooking water.
5. Add the blanched peas and greens, soba noodles and tofu back into the pot with the remaining cooking water and the remaining mentsuyu. Give everything a toss and give the broth a taste to see if it needs to be diluted with water or made more savoury with mentsuyu.
6. Divide the soba mixture into two large bowls and garnish with sesame seeds, nori and spring onions.
7. Slurp it all up and enjoy!

Notes

• You can easily increase the servings by preparing more soba noodles and vegetables because the mentsuyu is made in such a large batch!
• If you make this for meal prepping, prep your noodles, veg and protein into a container and keep the broth separate, add it in when you're ready to eat.
• Feel free to swap out the vegetables with whatever else is in season or that inspires you. Purple cabbage would be beautiful, slice kale, shiitake mushrooms... whatever takes your fancy!
• Swap out the tofu for chicken or prawns!