noodle salads...dino food?

yep. staring into the fridge again, its 6:30pm and I'm thinking I should make a soup, but instead saw the tubs of cooked noodles I had made in batches the other night for lunch options...quick salad time all of a sudden sounded much better.

I added a finely chopped fresh fennel bulb (you could use carrot), some japanese pickles, including the hijiki pickle I made that seemed to be a serious reminder of that dark watery scene in Princess Bride as I fished them out of the soy sauce marinade.  Then a splash of the marinade, some vinegar and some furikake.

When I am doing some kind of cooking, I try to piggy back a little prep on another meal.  Sometimes it feels like I'm backfiring and I get every pot and pan dirty, but I always get to reap the rewards later.

Noodles, particularly asian noodles, are often an easy piggy back:  Its only one more pot, you are dealing with hot water, which cleans itself, and I often want to do batches of different kinds, usually setting a small colander in the water that I can easily pull the first batch out, tonging the colander out then finishing in classic pasta fashion, draining in the sink.  This time I started with a batch of buckwheat soba and finished with pad thai rice linguine.

Here are some tips when cooking noodles in this way:

• shorten the cooking time 30seconds- 1 minute
  
• rinse the noodles with cold water until they are cold throughout
  
• it often helps future use by adding a little oil for easy separation later (exception is the classic zaru soba salad, where the noodles will easily separate by being rinsed again)-I love to add sesame oil to the rice noodles and olive oil and a touch of salt to western pasta.
• keep in mind many kinds of noodles expand, but rice noodles seem less so.

Once you have this part already cooked, it is so much easier to throw a single meal salad together later.

I still have the rice noodles left and I'm going to chop up some cilantro, mint and some basil if I have it, add some tofu and perhaps even a miso-ish dressing for another meal...more on that later!