Stir-fried Winter Squash and Tofu with Soba

Winter squash, tofu, and soba are all favorites of mine, so how excellent to find a dish combining all of them, right? But no, Stir-fried Winter Squash and Tofu with Soba is not a keeper. It's not terrible, but suffers from "would you like some starch with your starch?" syndrome. Like potato tacos, or the complete breakfast of cereal with milk, toast, and orange juice once recommended by cereal commercials. Or grain-based veggie burgers on a bun. Yuck. I would not like some starch with my starch.

Not that butternut squash isn't delicious and healthy, but I feel like the soba noodles need something more zingy. And the squash took forever to cook, so my dish wasn't all pretty and bright orange like the picture, but brownish and messy looking. It seemed sort of bland, too.

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.