Urgh Season.

While I love autumn, it definitely has a huge drawback: the start of urgh season. My immune system isn't what it should be, I hate being sick with a burning passion and I seem to catch everything no matter what I do. Urgh! 

The only thing to do is just to ride along with it: hydrate, rest and nourish myself the best I can. Unfortunately PB has also succumbed to whatever germ cloud is floating around so the energy struggle was real over the past few days. 

Luckily there was some leftovers from the previous post prep in the freezer (sticky toffee oats and salmon pate) and since we've both been poorly sick, we're in the soup zone! My plan was to make the Vegan Cauliflower Soup from the I Love My Instant Pot: Anti Inflammatory Diet Recipe Book. 

Intially it turned out a little thin in consistency for me (although I admit I like my soups thick...more a puree really) so I added a tin of new potatoes (judge if you wanna but they are useful to have on hand) and that sorted it. I definitely want to try some other recipes from this book now.

Dinner on Monday was something different, we'd found a couple of packages of dry udon noodles so I set to finding something easy and pantry friendly to use them and found Japanese Style Tuna Noodles recommended on a reddit thread and I had most of the ingredients so I set to work:

Japanese Style Tuna Noodles
Sam Sifton, New York Times Cooking, with modifications.

Ingredients:

Dressing:
1 tablespoon canola oil (based on advice from aforementioned reddit thread, this is half of the original amount. I also used the last dregs from a bottle of olive oil instead) 
2 tablespoons sesame oil (I used pure but I'm sure toasted would be okay too)
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 tablespoon mirin
1 tablespoon soy sauce (again, not specified but I used light soy sauce. I think dark would be too overpowering here)
1 teaspoon sweet miso (I had no miso on hand so I used some vegan fish sauce instead, a scant teaspoon)

Everything Else:
250g udon noodles (this is the size of the packets I have)
2 tins of tuna in spring water, drained and fluffed up
1/4 cup wakame seaweed - this I didn't have on hand but you could substitute with nori sheets or edamame, probably? I didn't have those either!

To Serve:
Sliced spring onions
Furikake and/or toasted sesame seeds (you can toast your own, of course)

Prep: 
1. Soak the wakame if using according to package instructions, otherwise prepare nori by shredding into fine ribbons and/or preparing the edamame. 
2. Boil noodles, again according to package instructions.
3. Whisk all dressing ingredients together and put aside. 
4. Drain tuna, put in bowl and place aside. 
5. Drain noodles well then put into bowl with tuna and add the veggie component if you've added one. Pour dressing over and toss to coat. You can do a fancier presentation by just dressing the noodles and veggies then putting the tuna on top but this is nothing fancy so I didn't. 
6. Serve with toppings of choice.  

As the weights of my pantry ingredients (noodles and tuna) were slightly more than those specified in the original recipe, I may increase the dressing recipe by half next time although it was a lovely light dinner that came together quickly and felt very different for a pantry/quick meal. 

It's horribly inauthentic but you could use linguine pasta instead of udon noodles as I know not everyone has the option of using them due to cost/location reasons. I think we bought these as an aldi special buy some time ago (?). I ate some leftovers cold the day after and can confirm the flavours hold up well.

We also had some orange juice to use up as PB was finding it was causing a lot of acid reflux for him so I scaled up this Orange Juice Muffins with Greek Yogurt and made thirty six (!) muffins which are now in the freezer ready for (many!) mornings ahead. Greek yogurt is an absolute game-changer for muffins which I always had a touch of difficulty in getting them light and fluffy but any muffin recipe that uses greek yogurt is always a winner for me. 

Today was a bit different, PB took a day off work and we went to see the Wallace and Gromit exhibition at The Harris which has finally reopened. Original models, sets, storyboards and concept art (A Grand Day Out was originally going to be very different...) and it was a brilliant opportunity to look at objects crafted by multi-disciplined artists with such a staggering level of detail. Nick Park has done much for the city of Preston and this exhibition is another feather in that cap. 

Back to food! We decided to have lunch at Kimji which is a Korean place we've been to a couple of times. We were going to try the bentos on the lunch menu but we were waylaid by the specials menu (every time we go, this happens!) which was Halloween themed so we ordered a charcoal bao buns to share and a portion of Jjajangbap each but unfortunately they had no Jjajangbap left but they did very kindly let us preview the next special - chicken katsu - which was very nice. 

Spicier than you'd expect from a katsu but that actually made the dish for me since we have mild katsu at home fairly often. The charcoal bao buns were delicious - I preferred the texture of these and I'm not sure if it was due to the charcoal content changing the recipe or not...Kimji never disappoints. We're always too full to attempt a dessert even though everytime I go there that's what I want to try the most!

Afterwards, we wandered down to an Asian supermarket for some supplies (sesame oil, gochujang, miso, wakame, etc) and perhaps they are between deliveries but it didn't seem to have quite the usual level of choice in stock. Prices have gone up a fair bit too - recently an Asian supermarket has opened up much closer to us and it's much cheaper there but they're still building their stock range so we'll see how it develops there. Then across the road to Moon Moon, a Chinese bakery, where we bought a slice of Japanese chiffon cheesecake and a slice of pandan + mango swiss roll for later on.  

A very tasty and fun day!