This one is super summery, light but satisfying! It features lettuce, crunchy vegetables, and my favorite trick, quick pickled radishes, which become a beautiful shade of Barbie pink. This takes almost no time to make, but the radishes are most beautiful if you let them sit at least an hour after making them. I make too many at once and eat them over a few days.
Read moreUmi Noodle Salad with Chicken, Tomato and Cucumber
This is a very literal, pared down riff on hiyashi chuka, the Japanese summertime classic of cold ramen noodles in a sesame dressing. We’ve made the dressing for you! All you need is a bit of leftover chicken (or panfried tofu or mushrooms!), a cucumber, a handful of tomatoes, green onion, and if you’re anything like me, chili oil. I dare you to take more then 3 minutes to boil and assemble this whole thing! It’s instantaneous and wonderful. A mid-summer classic.
Read moreUmi Noodle Salad with Kimchi and Sardines
Cooking has been brutal with the temperature inside my home at 95 degrees. One thing that is helping me enormously is the ease of our Noodles with Miso Sesame Sauce, and cold noodle salads generally. I put water on to boil, rinse and prep a few veggies (or in this case, just open a jar of Choi’s kimchi!), walk away, sit in front of our box fan, come back once the water is sputtering, boil the noodles for 2 minutes, toss with sauce, top with toppings, and that’s it! It’s as low maintenance as a sandwich and infinitely more texturally interesting and fun to eat.
Read moreNoodles with Miso Sesame Sauce, Meatballs, Broccoli Raab and Pickled Radishes
This recipe is inspired by the farmer market in spring, when the first radishes and raabs hit. It’s always amazing to see raabs—bouquets of greens that have overwintered and are sending up flowers to become seeds for the next season. Broccoli raab is the most famous of the raab, but we are also crazy for arugula, cabbage, collard, and kale raabs. And the best way we’ve found to cook them is to blanch them in boiling water, which happens to be exactly how you cook noodles! So we cook them together for a really easy dinner hack.
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