Soba?

I'm pretty bad at grocery stores.

I'm the girl who stands in front of the shelves of olive oil, comparing prices, picking up bottles, trying to determine quality based on cost and packaging, making a final decision, then pushing the cart back to the same spot three minutes later to return the chosen bottle and go for the sale item.



I don't really know what I'm doing when I'm grocery shopping. I don't know the difference between brands, I don't know what half of those vegetables are or what I can cook them with, I don't know if I'm getting ripped off on meat, and sometimes I come home with cracked eggs in the carton because I didn't check them thoroughly enough. So one can only imagine what I'm like at a grocery store where the majority of the foods aren't even labeled in English.



A couple of weekends ago, I found myself in the noodle aisle at the Super H-Mart near my apartment. I was looking for soba noodles. I know nothing about soba noodles. I know they're healthy and they're made with buckwheat flour and they're Japanese. I knew I didn't want to get too much in case I didn't like them, and I knew I didn't want to get some expensive Americanized version. I compared prices and nutritional info and ingredients and packaging and asked myself if it's really worth it to spend more on organic. In the end, I chose the one with the least amount of sodium content.

I don't think I made them right. The package said to cook them in boiling water for six to eight minutes, except mine were starting to get mushy after four. And then they clumped together after I drained and rinsed them. But they were still noodle-y and edible and the kale and garlic helped a lot.



Fortunately, there are still five more bundles in the package for me to experiment with. Pretty soon I'll be a soba noodle expert. And then I'll march into that H-Mart, having conquered the soba noodle, and I'll tackle the udon. Ha.