Otsu: best soba noodle dish ever

In the past few months, I've been making this soba noodle dish often. It's possibly my favorite recipe from Heidi Swanson's Super Natural Food. Fortunately the recipe is posted on Heidi's site for easy reference. I leave the olive oil out of the sauce and use more cucumber, but otherwise this recipe is perfect.

Annie Chun brand soba noodles are good. I had ordered six boxes from amazon, and was pleased with them. Having used them up, I now have some Roland brand soba noodles, which are thinner and don't seem to soak up the sauce as well. I've also gotten soba noodles from the big Korean grocery store at Belmont and Kimball. They are cheap there. I would go there more often but it's such an unpleasant walk. I hate walking under the freeway overpass through the pigeon shit, and Kimball is a depressing street.

The noodles from the Korean grocery are not as good as Annie Chun, and not pure buckwheat, unfortunately. I've yet to try pure buckwheat soba noodles--you can get them at Whole Foods--because they are at least twice as expensive as the wheat/buckwheat mixture.