Lovely Surprises

mushroom salt shakers: ModCloth.com

Made this chicken soba bowl recipe from fitness magazine today after ages of being way too scared to try Soba noodles. Why? Well for one thing they're brown, not a reassuring color. Generally speaking I think that if a food is brown it needs to be really awesome to make up for it. You know, chocolate, coffee, vanilla beans, cinnamon, all awesome despite the dirty rotten color. And given that it's a buckwheat noodle, I was skeptical. I mean "buckwheat", doesn't the word itself just make you cringe? Makes me think of "health food" items that taste like box. But this, this was lovely. It had that familiar noodle taste with a hint of nutty wheat flavor. So so good. The recipe was good too I thought, just don't make it if you don't like broccoli. Seriously. Broccoli haters stay away, you will be sorry. It called for baby Bok Choy and shitake mushrooms too but I couldn't find any so I just went with  fresh button mushrooms and broccoli.

Also, ALSO, my little local grocery store suddenly, randomly got some D'anjou pears! I walked in today and there they were in a little ruby row, I thought they were pomegranates at first and almost walked right by. I got overexcited and bought a TON even though I've only ever tasted them in that salad I had at Panera. They'll probably taste like every other lovely pear but on top of the fact that I'm pear obsessed right now I'm sucked in by the dreaminess of the name. D'anjou, D'anjou.