Remember when I thought I wouldn’t have enough knitting to fill a blog, so I decided it would be about food and knitting? Yeah. I clearly forgot about that too. In my defence, that is at least partly because it has been so friggin’ hot here (we’re talking mid-40s Celcius with the humidex) that the very thought of turning on my stove makes me queasy. Also, we’ve been eating out far more often than is characteristic, and when we eat at home, well, there have been a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches (what can I say – I’m five-years-old at heart).

Last week, though, inspired partly by this tweet, I decided I finally wanted to use that package of soba noodles that had been sitting in my cupboard for months. I searched around on PunchFork (warning: you will lose hours on this site) and found the perfect blend of summer meal + veggies + soba noodles: Smitten Kitchen’s Spicy Soba Noodles with Shiitakes.

It’s weird how the combination of soba noodles and shiitakes make it look like there’s seafood in there, but I assure you it was 100% vegetarian.

It was easy, delicious, and made for awesome leftovers, and has both L and I planning to make it weekly. Holy moly was it good. I modified the ingredients slightly, in that I used sambal oelek for the spicy part, and then misread the sauce ingredients, and thus used olive oil instead of water, and upon realizing my mistake (and that I’d finished all our soy sauce, so there was no starting over) just splashed some water in there. It turned out very well nonetheless. I also splashed in some sesame oil. I also used sweet potato buckwheat soba noodles, and while I’m not sure it makes a difference, they were really good and I will hunt them down to use again.

If you are looking for something delicious and easy to make on a hot summer night, I really can’t recommend this highly enough. Delicious!