Jinghan In The Kitchen I: Cold-Served Soba Noodles

In high-school a friend of mine had an imaginary cooking show whose theme song we made up and went something like this: “Beccy in the kitchen, the kitchen, the kitchen… Beccy in the kitchen… run. a. way.” Followed by something like “today Beccy will be cooking choc-chip cookies… oh wait we ran out of choc-chips maybe these thumbtacks will make a good replacement…” So I am completely and shamelessly plagiarising this and making it my own… except maybe without the thumbtacks…

♫ Jinghan in the kitchen, the kitchen, the kitchen

♫ Jinghan in the kitchen, run♭a ♯ way♮

Today Jinghan is making Cold-Served Soba Noodles with random salad vegetables!

 

Ingredients: 

  • Soba (Japanese buck wheat) noodles (or what ever other sort of noodles you want/have. Even the instant kind is okay.)
  • Salad vegetable of your choice (Jinghan will be using cucumber and tomato, but capsicum or even lightly cooked broccoli drained and cooled and other stuff can also be good)
  • Pickles (or olives, or capers, or picked something else if you prefer that, or none of these if you prefer bland food)
  • Soy Sauce
  • Egg + oil for frying egg (or cooked lentils, or cooked chic peas or beans of none of these if you are too lazy to want protein in your food)
  • Thumbtacks
What to do: 
  1. Boil some water in a saucepan and when the water is boiling put noodles in, based on how much you want to eat (the back of the packet usually tells you how much is approximately one serving)
  2. In the meantime chop up all the vegetables and pickles and beat the egg in a separate bowl (all while keeping an eye on the stove in case the pot boils over)
  3. The ONLY way (okay… that’s a lie, but it’s still the best way) to check whether the noodles are done is to take out a strand and test it’s chewiness. [if crunchy: did you put water in? if chewy: boil it for longer. if not so chewy that it feels like you’re eating gummy bears: it’s good! if soggy: take it out! take it out!]
  4.  Drain the noodles and run under cold water until cold.
  5. Put everything (except raw egg in bowl) douse in soy-sauce with a generous (read: generous) attitude and toss/stir everything together
  6. Heat (plenty of) oil in pan, flick little droplets of egg into the hot oil until they cook within a few seconds (this is still jinghan’s preferred method of working out if the oil is hot enough) pour all of egg into pan and stir around with chopsticks until the egg is no longer liquid. [you know you didn’t wait long enough for the oil to heat up if the egg sinks straight down and sticks to the pot and there is a layer of oil on top of everything… or you didn’t put enough oil in… if the egg sticks regardless of how hot or how much the oil is then the pan is just a bad pan and you should soak it in water later to get all the egg off.]
  7. dump egg on top of other food
  8. eat! eat!
  9. clean the kitchen. (no. really. look at that mess.)