Saturday, June 1 Roasted Napa Cabbage with Soba Noodle and Tofu Stir-Fry Rating: 4

Another nice surprise in the CSA box was a GIGANTIC napa cabbage. Which I had no idea what to do with. I’ve bought them once or twice before for specific recipes and then find myself unable to come up with enough uses before they start to go bad. So, I did the only logical thing and asked Twitter what to do with it. A friend of ours suggested grilling it, which sounded really appealing. I’ve had grilled red cabbage and love it. Except we can’t grill at our building, so he suggested broiling it instead, which I thought was genius. I poked around online and found a basic recipe that I used as a guide. I changed it up a little bit and added some chili oil to it to spice it up a little. I also didn’t roast the individual leaves, but sliced the cabbage in half lengthwise and roasted it sliced side face up. It turned out pretty good, but I think we both would’ve liked it better mixed into the noodles as opposed to served on the side. The roasted flavor was quite good though, and I will do this again if I get another one of these. We also had two medium sized heads of broccoli in the CSA box, which made me very, very happy. We love broccoli oh so very much around here.  I had half a large brick of super-firm tofu that I stuck in the freezer when I used the other half for something else, so I thawed that out and marinated it in the Asian tofu marinade from Veganomicon, which is a staple at our place. I’m not a super huge fan of the frozen/thawed tofu method – I think it makes it too spongy (maybe I’m just not doing it right?), but the sponginess does make it absorb marinade really easily, so there’s that. I baked it alongside the cabbage for a bit, then tossed it in the wok with a little coconut oil to crisp it up. The only thing we needed to buy for this was a little bag of mini bell peppers; everything else was already on hand – half a box of soba noodles, onion, garlic, carrots and all the marinade ingredients. Once the veggies were cooked, we mixed in the (cooked) noodles, leftover marinade (I mixed a little cornstarch into it to thicken it up) and tofu – voila! Dinner!