Soba Salad with Honey Soy Sauce

With temperatures looking like they will soar slightly over the next couple of weeks, I'm really eager to share with you a tried and tested Soba Salad with Honey Soy Sauce recipe.

Refreshing Soba Salad, perfect on a hot summer's day.

Soba is one of my favourite Japanese noodles. It's made out of buckwheat and you'll just need to boil the noodles according to the instructions on the packaging. If you live in Frankfurt, soba is readily available at all Asian supermarkets.

This recipe was adapted from Just One Cookbook (my favourite online Japanese cooking resource).

Firstly, here's the list of ingredients for the sauce (For original recipe, please see here.)
1 Tbsp. canola or grapeseed oil
3 Tbsp. sesame oil
½ tsp. mixed chilli & pepper
3 Tbsp. honey
3 Tbsp. soy sauce

Other Ingrediants
3-4 bundles of soba noodles (serves 4)
1 spring onion
2 medium carrots, grated

Instructions
1. Mix the oil, mixed chilli and pepper and sesame oil in a small sauce pan. Heat it on medium heat for 10 minutes.

2. In a separate bowl, mix the honey well with the soy sauce.

3. When the oil mixture is done, carefully mix it with the honey and soy sauce. Whisk well to ensure that the honey is dissolved.

4. Cook the soba noodles according to the instructions on the packaging (no need to add salt!). Once it's cooked, run it under cold water and set aside to drain.

5. In a big bowl, mix the soba, spring onions, carrots and honey soy sauce. Toss the mixture well and serve either cold or at room temperature.

Although I had this for lunch on a day with a maximum of only 14 degrees Celsius, I can imagine how refreshing the noodles would be on a hot summer's day. I love it so much that I'm serving it for dinner as a main dish with a couple of pan-fried salmon fillets.

Okonomiyaki

 

A few weeks back we had an okonomiyaki party at a friend’s place. It was so much fun and I realised how easy it was to make this Japanese pizza-like dish. When I got home, I searched online for a good recipe as my friend didn’t measure any of her ingredients (what an expert!).
 
Today I’ll share with you a basic and easy okonomiyaki recipe that allows you to be versatile in whatever ingredients you might want to use. I love Marc’s recipe because he teaches you the basics which then gives you room to improvise. It’s pretty much what I think cooking is about – it isn’t set in stone.

In my version, these are the ingredients I used in addition to the basic recipe based on 4 serving portions.

125g bacon bits
60g Parmesan cheese
60g mozzarella
1 medium-sized tin of tuna 

Step 1: Mix all the dry ingredients together.

Step 2: Add the eggs and dashi (stock).

Step 3: Add bacon bits and tin of tuna.

Step 4: Mix the ingredients well and ensure that they are well coated with the basic batter.

Step 5: Scoop a ladle of the mixture into a frying pan with oil which is heated to medium-high heat. Cook covered with a lid for 7 minutes. The bottom should be brown and then repeat the same for the other side.

Step 6: Serve on a plate. Garnish it with mayonnaise, okonomiyaki sauce, aonori (or just use regular seaweed – aonori is soooooo expensive in Frankfurt!), katsuobushi and red Japanese ginger (I omitted it as the Asian supermarket I visited didn’t have any in stock). 

Don’t be put off by the steps involved. It’s a really easy recipe to follow. Just dump all the ingredients in a huge bowl and pan-fry it, how tough can that get, right?

Crispy Baked Chicken

Remember me saying I was going to try Just One Cookbook’s Crispy Baked Chicken recipe? I’ve tried Nami-san’s delicious Tonkatsu recipe and homemade tonkatsu recipe (here’s my post for it) and really loved it. However, I wanted a healthier version. I’m really glad that she has an oven baked version of it!
I served the crispy baked chicken with homemade chips, bacon wrapped asparagus and homemade Tonkatsu sauce. It was definitely healthier, less cleaning up and very crispy. It was also very easy to cook, so do give the recipe a try!

Vegetable Tempura

One of the set dishes I always order at a Japanese restaurant is Vegetable Tempura. I love the crispy batter and how it soaks up the tasty tempura sauce. As I’m currently in the phase of experimenting and learning how to cook Japanese cuisine, I made Vegetable Tempura for dinner.

I like cooking to be fuss-free. Ideally, I should be able to get all the ingredients from the 4 different German supermarkets within walking distance from my apartment on a weekday. When I decided to make tempura, I wasn’t sure if I could get tempura flour. Therefore I was thrilled to learn from Just One Cookbook that I could make my own batter at home! So convenient and definitely cheaper too!

I didn’t exactly use the same vegetables as Nami-san’s recipe but I’m glad they still turned out well. As we only get asparagus in Spring in Germany, I was quick to get a bundle the moment I saw them. I also used sweet potatoes and an eggplant (aubergine). It turned out to be a feast for Daniel and I.

The tempura was crispy and so much less oily than what you would get in restaurants. I never reuse frying oil because I simply can’t bear the thought to, so I would like to think that deep-frying at home is cleaner than the ones you get outside.

Nami-san also provided the recipe for tempura sauce on her blog. Seriously, does she need to buy any bottled sauces? She seems to know how to make everything from scratch and make it look so easy!

As it was a slightly warm Spring Day, I served the lovely tempura with Zaru Soba. Ahhhh… Refreshing it was! Unfortunately I didn’t have all the ingredients to make the dipping sauce for the soba so I took the easy way out and used bottled Mentsuyu.

If you’re a vegetable tempura lover, do try the recipe out at home. You’ll love it!

Any packet of soba will give you cooking instructions but I found the detailed instructions on Just One Cookbook really good to ensure I get the texture right.

Here are the links to the recipes.
Vegetable Tempura & sauce recipe
Zaru Soba recipe
I hope you’ll enjoy the vegetable tempura and Zaru soba as much as I did!