Text — 5-minute Miso Vegetable Noodles for one
I’ve never felt terribly confident as a chef, but I’ve been really getting into Japanese cooking lately. I just made myself some delightful noodles for lunch, so as much for my memory’s benefit as yours, here’s a quick recipe for vegetable noodles for one:
Ingredients
200ml water
1 nest of dried noodles (ideally soba)
1 sachet instant miso soup
Half a handful of mange tout
1 small green chilli
1 large cabbage leaf
5mm-thick slice of root ginger
A quarter of a sheet of nori
Start by boiling a kettle, then pour that water into a pan. Add the noodles, and boil them according to the directions on the packed — usually about 4 minutes or so. Stir occasionally.
While those are boiling, chop up the mange tout, nori and the cabbage leaf into long thin strips. Chop the chilli up very small, removing all the seeds. Remove the skin from the ginger, and then slice it into a series of 7 or 8 very thin strips. A good knife will help a lot here.
Once the noodles are done, pop them into a colander and rinse them under cold water to get rid of the starch. While you’re doing that, boil the kettle again, add 200ml of hot water to the pan, and keep over a low heat so it doesn’t keep boiling. Add the instant miso packet and stir well, then stick in all the vegetables.
Heat for a minute or so, then drop in the (now cold) noodles. Give them another minute or so to heat up, pour into a bowl and serve.
The taste is pretty mild at first, but gets stronger (spicier and more gingery) the further you get through the dish. If it’s too mild for you at first, feel free to add a liberal splash of soy sauce.
