Last Saturday (Feb 1, 2014) my friend Lauren who is a fellow graduate student in my department was feeling a bit down and her foot was really hurting from a running injury, so i forced her to get up and come cook with me.  Having been on the Mediterranean train for a while, I chose two yummy sounding asian style dishes from Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi. I must say, I’ve expanded my sauce and spice collection exponentially since I started cooking from these books! I figure I am in the investing stage right now, but pretty soon I will have a nice baseline so shopping for every new recipe will not be as big of an endeavor.  We made the cooked soba noodles with eggplant and mango from page 112 first. Lauren has an inexplicable love for chopping, so I set her to chopping the eggplant into beautiful diced pieces while I prepped the soba noodles.

This was my first time cooking soba noodles – they are very flavorful! We got the water boiling first and there was a lot of eggplant so we ended up frying it in 4 batches and then straining it.

After cutting up the mango, herbs, and onion, we mixed mixed all the noodles and mango and eggplant and herbs and onion together at once.

Unfortunately we didn’t realize you were supposed to let it sit for 1-2 hrs before, so we ate it right away and leftovers tomorrow will probably be even better! It was a super light refreshing flavorful and zesty dish with herbs that I would definitely never have bothered to use before but make everything taste so much better!

To accompany the soba noodles, we made the sweet winter slaw from page 102 featured here. Here are all the ingredients for the dish:

I don’t like papaya, so we used a single mango instead.  We made a few blunders during the cooking of the dish – we accidentally placed the red chile into the dressing before placing it on the stove! We decided to go with it and mixed the rest of the ingredients for the dressing into the ban, boiled them, let them cool, and strained it in a makeshift manner using my vegetable steamer and a bowl to get rid of the lemongrass pieces.

We washed and chopped the savoy and red cabbage and mango while the dressing was reducing.

I mixed together the cabbage and mango in a bowl and added the reduced part of the dressing before adding the oil, and was wondering why it looked like so little! No worries, I added the oil to the cabbage mixture and mixed it all super well.

The absolute most amazing part of this dish is the caramelized nuts. We couldn’t find macademia nuts at the Monterey Market, so we used cashew nuts instead, and they were incredible! I had never caramelized nuts before in sugar and butter and salt and chile but it made them super delectable (unsurprisingly!).

These dishes were super refreshing and delightful, and despite the rough start to her day, Lauren ended up a very happy camper that evening :)