The last thing you want to do is dive into a steaming hot bowl of anything, but a girl can only eat so many salads. A lot of Asian cultural cuisines have noodle and soup dishes that are served cold, particularly refreshing in the sweltering heat of the summer. We've already seen Vietnamese bun (rice noodles) and Korean naeng-myun (buckwheat). The Japanese also serve cold noodles - soba.

"Soba" is the Japanese word for buckwheat, and refers also the noodles that are made from the grain. The noodles are dark grayish-brown and have an interesting shape, as they are "squared-off" rather than in the shape of a long thin cylinder.

Cold soba can be served a number of ways, and each one has a different name based on the slight variation. For mori soba, the buckwheat noodles are cooked rinsed in cold water, then placed on a bamboo plate. The noodles are served with a small bowl of soba-tsuyu, which is a strongly flavored chilled broth/dipping sauce, made of dashi (broth), mirin, and shoyu (soy sauce). Along with the soba-tsuyu, the mori soba is served with sliced scallions, and wasabi. Zaru soba is served the same way, with an additional ingredient, julienned nori sprinkled on top of the soba noodles.

There are a few ways to eat mori soba. If the soba noodles are in a bowl, the diner can simply pour the soba-tsuyu over it, add any of the scallions and wasabi, and eat it just like any other type of noodle-soup. The other way is to pick up some of the noodles from the bamboo plate, dip them into the soba-tsuyu, then slurp the noodles. You can add the side ingredients to the bowl with the dipping sauce, or pick some up along with the noodles with chopsticks from the plate.

Soba is very easy to make at home. Yes, of course you have to use the oven to cook the noodles, but when you eat it will be cold, so no fretting. Cook soba noodles in boiling water until tender, drain, and rinse iwth cold water. For the soba-tsuyu, you can either use prepared dashi, or make it by simmering a few handfuls of bonito (about 1/2 cup) in 4 cups of water, then straining off the bonito. For every 2 cups of dashi broth, add 1/2 cup soy sauce and 3-4 Tbsp. mirin. (You can also make this vegetarian if you use a vegetable based broth).

Serve as suggested above, with scallions, wasabi, and julienned nori.