This is probably the most simple meal I’ve made in a while, but it’s also photographed the nicest, thanks to my obsession with Japanese dishery. (No, dishery probably isn’t a real word, but I’m owning it thanks.)

The soba was bought from Mitsuwa a few days before I noticed that Trader Joe’s started carrying the same item. It’s just regular soba that has powdered green tea in the noodle dough. The taste change is subtle, but the color is appealing.

When you eat cold soba, you would usually dip it into tsuyu, which is also used for dipping tempura items. Tsuyu is very rarely vegan (though I hear that Yamasa’s tempura tsuyu is fish free), so I pulled a recipe from one of my numerous Japanese veggie cookbooks, Japanese Cooking – Contemporary & Traditional by Miyoko Nishimoto Schinner. Condiments that I chose for the tsuyu were scallions and wasabi, and used a fancy schmancy sakura shaped vegetable cutter for the carrot bits (which I only did because I was going to photograph the meal and to show off.)

I was having a serious edamame jones, and I didn’t have any unshelled edamame on hand so I boiled up a bag of the shelled ones, sprinkled with some sea salt (I really need some kosher salt) and called it a day.

The tea is gyokuro, a hoity toity green variety that is prepared using not very hot water and you only steep it for a short time. Anything more harsh than that kills the delicate flavor of the leaves; they’re the same leaves used for maccha, the powdered green tea used in tea ceremony.

It was yummy and now I have to run out and buy soba trays (basically a bamboo sieve) and chopstick rests because I have an overwhelming need to be fancy.

I’m going to level with you: I’ve been sick for the past two weeks, so I haven’t exactly been doing anything in the kitchen. I’m finally starting to feel better, so it was time to whip out a new Indianish recipe.

Recipe from: La Dolce Vegan

It’s not exactly like what we’re used to at our local restaurant, but it was pretty good. I might have grated too much ginger, because I wasn’t too keen on the ginger overload; Jake felt that there wasn’t enough garam masala, so he doctored the dish accordingly. He also rolled out the chapati dough and manned the cast iron to cook it up, and then decided that after I had done all of the prep for the aloo gobi that he would cook it himself. It gave me an opportunity to put my feet up and refer to him as my monkey butler. I think I prefer naan to chapati, but it was still tasty and fairly easy to whip up.

Recipe from: Vegan with a Vengeance

I made them this time with whole wheat flour, mostly because I’m trying not to have any white flour in the house and I think this pretty unhealthy cookie will survive the conversion. The first time that I made this cookie, the dough was super crumbly and was difficult to spoon on to the baking sheets. This time, it was slightly crumbly but it wasn’t a big deal. I blame the Earth Balance – I had two tubs, one mostly empty and the other one brand new. While the mostly empty tub was nicely at room temperature, the bit that I had to take from the new tub wasn’t quite not cold enough. Oh well, lessons and all that.

They’re still delicious.