Eat Your Veggies! Spicy Soba Salad

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[Jump right to the recipe: Spicy Soba Noodle and Vegetable Salad]

Over the years I’ve faced two ongoing hurdles in reaching my healthy eating goals:

• Eating enough vegetables
• Making healthy lunches

It’s not that I don’t like vegetables, but I don’t love them, and my repertoire of vegetable dishes is small, so I tend to burn my options out pretty quickly. Lunch is its own brand of fun because it often gets lost in the healthy dinner fray. By the time I’m done with my day and dinner, the thought of prepping lunch for the next day is a bit more than I can handle. To attack these two challenges I’m going to try a few new tactics:

• Actively seek out and develop new vegetable recipes. (Have a favorite? Please let me know in the comments.)
• Shop at my farmers market and ask my fellow food bloggers, the farmers, and other local sources for their favorite ways to prepare in-season vegetable.
• Add more vegetables to every dish I practically can.
• Plan dinners that turn into easy lunches the next day.

This week I put a couple of these tactics to use to create a hearty pasta recipe that uses four different kinds of vegetables, including one that’s somewhat new to me – bok choy. It’s based on a recipe for BBQ lamb chops with a soba noodle salad that I first had in a cooking class with Terry Conolan, the executive chef at the renowned Lake Austin Spa and Resort. Terry is a big believer in big flavors and using collections of vegetables in a single dish. I took his original concept and focused on the soba salad as the main dish. I made the dressing spicier and added edamame to create a dish that in a half portion goes well as a side for dinner, but in a full portion is a wonderful lunch. It keeps beautifully in the fridge for several days, so make the whole batch and you’ve got lunches for a couple of days at the very least.

Learn more about soba noodles

Recipe: Spicy Soba Noodle and Vegetable Salad

Details

• Difficulty: Easy
• Serves: 4 as a main dish, 6-8 as a side dish
• Prep Time: 20-30 minutes depending on your knife skills
• Weight Watchers™ Points: 8 (main dish serving)

Ingredients

For the dressing

• 3 Tbsp. lime juice
• 2 Tbsp. soy sauce
• 1 Tbsp. honey
• 1 Tbsp. rice wine vinegar
• 2 tsp. mirin
• 1 tsp. Sesame oil
• 2 tsp. sriracha sauce (hot chile sauce, usually in a bottle with a rooster logo)
• ¼ c. grape seed oil

For the salad

• 6 oz. uncooked soba noodles
• 1 c. frozen, shelled edamame
• ¾ c. chopped green onion
• 1 c. julienned carrot
• 1 c. julienned cucumber
• 1 c. sliced baby bok choy

Instructions

1. Combine all dressing ingredients in a small bowl and whisk to combine.
2. Bring a medium-sized pot of salted water to a boil. Add the soba noodles and edamame to the boiling water at the same time.
3. Cook for 5 minutes or until the noodles are tender. Drain and rinse with cold water.
4. Combine the cooked noodles and edamame, the chopped vegetables, and the dressing in a large mixing bowl. Toss gently to combine.

Recipe for Success

• The vegetables listed here are just a starting point – feel free to use any combination of crisp vegetables you like or have on hand. Red or yellow bell peppers would lend crunch and as would slivered spinach. Even crisp fennel would work as might some thinly sliced cabbage.
• To amp up the spice, use a little sriracha or toss in some thinly sliced fresh jalapenos.
• If you can’t get soba noodles, whole wheat spaghetti works well as a substitute.
• The edamame brings protein to this dish, but you could add thinly sliced steak, chicken, or pork for a meat component instead of or in addition to the edamame.