Miso soup with veggies, tofu, and noodles

When you first found out you or your loved one couldn't have gluten, maybe you said "OK, I can do this." You knew that there are lots of GF products out there. You figured you'd just skip the bread and pasta at restaurants and do OK. In fact, you started to think about frequenting Chinese restaurants, where everything comes with rice. Then came the most unexpected slap in the face, when you found out that soy sauce really should be called "wheat sauce" based on its ingredients.

Sadly, Asian food is one of the biggest casualties of the GF diet. Restaurants can be tough: it can be difficult to confirm whether a dish uses soy sauce or not. Sure, if I'm traveling, I can almost always get a plate of steamed veggies, tofu, and rice with no trouble at all at almost any Chinese or Thai place. But if I want Chinese takeout, steamed broccoli is not what I have in mind!

This brings us back to the common theme of GF living: you can probably make it better (and cheaper) yourself. High-quality tamari is often gluten-free and happens to taste better than many varieties of soy sauce. Many types of miso paste are gluten-free, too. The tough part is finding a good repertoire of sauces: most of the black bean sauce, chili sauce, etc that one finds on store shelves contain wheat-based soy sauce.

I'm still working on those challenges, but in the meantime, we can start simple with a vegan noodle soup recipe. This was one of those rare dinners that the entire family ate and enjoyed. My 7-year-old, normally a beyond-tough culinary audience, declared, "I'm brimming over with snowpeas and yumminess."

Fill a saucepan or small pot with water, about half to two-thirds as much as the amount of soup you want. Bring the water to a boil and add the following amount for each person (ie, multiply by 4 for 4 people):

• 1 small bunch of rice sticks (thin rice noodles)


• 2 scallions, chopped


• 2 or 3 baby carrots, sliced lengthwise into long slivers


• about 4 ears of baby corn


• about 6 snow pea pods


• a few sliced water chestnuts


• a few slices of bamboo shoot

Let the mixture simmer for a few minutes; as the rice noodles become soft, add a handful of tofu cubes and about 1 tsp miso paste per person. Once it is well-mixed, taste and add more miso as needed. A few drops of tamari and some sesame oil are nice to add, and we were able to find a GF black bean chili paste to spice things up a bit.

A note on where to find ingredients: if you are lucky enough to have an Asian grocery store, such as the H-Mart, near you, you are all set! Rice sticks, miso, tamari, baby corn, water chestnuts, and bamboo shoots are quite inexpensive at such stores, but they are pricey specialty items at most conventional grocery and natural food stores. While you're at the H-mart, you can stock up on rice flour, potato starch, tapioca starch, and more--and be sure to get a few red bean buns made from rice flour!