Cooking delicious food for guests with dietary preferences calls for creative use of the season's bounty. Our goal for a weeknight dinner with friends was a vegetarian, gluten-free main dish, using seasonal vegetables, ready in 30 minutes. After a visit to our local famers’ market, we set to work creating a vegetable based pasta dish with flavor and texture that would appeal to a wide range of eaters. To make Grilled Vegetable Soba Noodles with Rosemary Garlic Sauce, we grilled up fresh broccoli, cauliflower, green beans and zucchini. With a roasted garlic sauce in mind, we added whole garlic cloves to the grill, to see if we couldn’t achieve a roasted garlic flavor without turning on the oven. It worked brilliantly. While the vegetables and garlic grilled, we cooked up a quick batch of buckwheat soba noodles, a toothsome noodle that is also gluten free and cooks in 4 minutes. For a subtle sauce that would accompany the dish without overpowering the fresh flavors, we clipped some rosemary from our garden, added our grill-roasted garlic, a flurry of nutty parmesan cheese, and bright lemon for contrast. Enjoy summer vegetables and homespun food shared with the ones you love.    

We started making Teriyaki Steak Soba Noodles with Mushrooms in the colder months, searing off steak and mushrooms in a cast iron skillet, and tossing them with soba noodles in a rich homemade teriyaki sauce. Now that spring is here, we are getting local spring mushrooms in our CSA box and have been cranking up the grill for this deeply flavored dish. A dark, homemade teriyaki sauce serves as both quick marinade and robust sauce for healthy buckwheat soba noodles. We eat a lot of soba noodles here at the Hungry Hounds...check out our Carrot Soba Noodles With Ginger And Kale and Zucchini Soba Noodles With Grilled Vegetables. 

Today we are sharing a gluten free and vegetarian main that we absolutely love. Omit the fried egg, and you've got yourselves a vegan classic. Exclusionary food labels aside, this a lovely, simple, seasonal dish that is ready in 15 minutes. The trick to a great soba noodle dish is going big on flavor, so we heaped on the pungent tastes of garlic, ginger, and soy. Seasonal variants of soba noodles with a pungent vinaigrette and veggie noodles is a frequent favorite in our household. Our summer version of this dish includes zucchini noodles and grilled squash.

I hate leftovers. To me, there is nothing worse than a soggy day-old salad or a mealy reheated potato. Ok, fine, maybe not ALL leftovers are terrible. In fact, Paul and I eat them almost everyday as frozen workday lunches. Out of necessity, I've created a number of go-to dishes that are not only delicious the first time around, but real leftover wins. Soba noodles, a buckwheat pasta (often gluten free), have a number of things going for them in the leftover department: they cook in 4 minutes, have a great nutty taste, are good for you, and they freeze like champions.  

Zucchini Soba Noodles with Grilled Vegetables is one of our summer staples. This lightning-fast vegetarian main helpfully works through some of our zucchini back-log, by incorporating zucchini ribbons with unusual vinaigrette of mustard, soy sauce and lemon juice.  Add some grilled summer squash and red onions  and this dish is done in 10 minutes.