Roasting the tomatoes for this dish brings out their natural sweetness, while the mixture of the Asian-inspired vinaigrette and lime creates a sauce that's tangy and bright.
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Whenever I find myself in a culinary rut, I turn to magazines and the websites of some of my fellow food bloggers for inspiration.
(And when I'm
really strapped for ideas, I hit up
Pinterest... but only when I'm prepared to spend 1-2 hours doing nothing but scrolling through all of the pretty, pretty pins.)
Lately, I've been saving more and more recipes from
Food & Wine Magazine, including this one for
Soba Noodles with Miso-Roasted Tomatoes from the April 2014 issue. Everything about it sounded downright delicious, and I knew Stephen would have no objections to eating a plateful of soba noodles for dinner. When I finally managed to include the dish on
our weekly Menu Plan, I couldn't wait to get to the grocery store to pick up the ingredients I'd need.
Too bad my excitement dissipated less than five minutes after I arrived at the store.
When I got to the ethnic foods section of the market, I made the discovery that the store did not have soba noodles in stock and they didn't sell miso paste. I could have very easily gone to another store in town, but my basket was already full of items that I didn't have the energy to put back, so I stood in the middle of the aisle and formulated a backup plan right on the spot.
Choosing a substitute for the soba noodles was the easy part, and I decided to use whole wheat linguine. (It helped that it was on sale that day.) As for the miso situation, I pulled the recipe up on my phone to see what I would have mixed it with to create the dressing for the tomatoes -- canola oil, rice vinegar, ginger, sesame oil, honey, and lime.
Inspired, I headed immediately for the salad dressing aisle and started reading the labels of all the bottles. I was looking for a dressing that incorporated as many of those ingredients as possible and wound up getting a bottle of this toasted sesame, soy, and ginger dressing.
While soy sauce wasn't on the list of ingredients for the original recipe, I didn't think it would hurt to have that flavor profile going on in the background. I left the store knowing I wouldn't be able to make the recipe exactly as it appeared in the magazine, but I was excited about making the recipe my own.
I combined the bottled dressing with some freshly grated ginger, honey, lime zest, and lime juice. Then I coated the cherry tomatoes with a few tablespoons of the dressing before putting them in the oven to roast for about 20 minutes, just until the tomato skins had begun to burst and the tomatoes had started to char in places.
To finish the dish, just toss the roasted tomatoes with the pasta and some sliced scallions and then garnish with some toasted sesame seeds.
Looks pretty tasty, doesn't it?
In fact, my version of this dish turned out so well, I'm not sure I'll ever try the original! 😋
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