Thursday, January 28, 2010

Field Trip and Honeyed Tofu on Soba

This afternoon, Jacob and I took an exciting food field trip to the International Grocery on Cleveland.  This is a mainly Asian food grocery store that also offers a good amount of Latino foods.   I had never taken Jacob to this store, and buying ingredients for tonight's supper was a great excuse to go.  (I am still striving to shop for groceries once a week, but I could not find udon or tofu at Walmart to use in tofu on udon noodles.)  

The International Grocery has aisle after aisle of foods I have never tried- from exotic produce to frozen desserts to parts of pork I wasn't aware were edible.  I love looking at everything and imagining what it could be used to create.  

Jacob loved looking at the live fish in the seafood section.  This place is a regular aquarium compared to most grocery stores' meager tank full of lobsters.  Here, crabs and crawfish are crawling around in huge boxes.  Tilapia and catfish swim around waiting to be grabbed for supper.  The store's huge tank full of black eels will probably be involved in my next nightmare.   Eughgh!

But, all of these exciting distractions did not make us forget our reason for the trip.  We needed tofu and udon noodles.  Compared to Kroger, the tofu selection was huge and cheap.  I found what I wanted and moved on to noodles.

An entire aisle is devoted to noodles!  Maybe there were too many noodles- in the midst of all of those strangely marked bags, I could not find udon.  I settled for a bag of soba noodles and went to check-out.

Our dinner turned out tasty.  The soba (buckwheat flour noodles) were a fine substitute for the udon (wheat flour noodles).   The sauce of honey, soy sauce, rice-wine vinegar, spicy mustard, and orange juice went really well with the tofu, mushrooms, and soba.  I did not enjoy the texture of the cucumber.  When tossed with the hot noodles, the cucumber became kind of slimy and mushy.  But, it was easy to pick out and I picked it all out before refigerating the leftovers. 

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