Sequestration Meal #510

 

Still working with meal prep-style meals, I went in a Korean direction again, partly because I think the banchan-style cookery lends itself so well to meal prep. I had some chickpeas open in the fridge, so the main dish here is crispy yangnyeom chickpeas (recipe veganized from Food52), Korean carrot salad (also from Food52), Korean-style beet salad (recipe from Lavender and Macarons), and Japanese quick pickled cucumbers (recipe from Onolicious Hawaii). I'm not claiming this is even remotely authentic, but it does draw on some flavor profile themes, and even thought the cucumbers are Japanese-style, they don't use anything out of the ordinary for a Korean kitchen (it's just cucumber, salt, sugar, and rice vinegar, after all).

The chickpeas, clearly based on the popular yangnyeom chikin, were amazing. It may be the thing that would get me to just regularly eat whole chickpeas--something I don't so often do, really, because chickpeas aren't my favorite thing in the world. The sauce has some eyebrow-raising combinations (ketchup, strawberry jam, gochujang...hmm), but it works. I used rice nectar instead of honey for the finishing steps and it worked really well. The one thing I would do differently, probably, is that I don't think I needed to crisp up the chickpeas. Maybe I do, but I'd like to try this by just using quick-sauteed chickpeas. But I'll also be trying this out on soy curls, because I imagine they'd be amazing this way. It's a really easy recipe, in any case--just measure stuff and stir it, mostly.

I already knew I loved this style of carrot salad; I just tried a different recipe for it this time for no apparent reason. It tastes very similar, though, and the preparation methods are virtually the same. I especially love that it works so well as a make-ahead salad.

The beet salad was also absolutely delicious. I really need to eat more beets overall; I love beets. I just usually find them a bit intimidating because they stain so easily. Did I end up with hands stained red after this? Yes, but that mostly washed away and didn't really linger for the whole weekend or anything.

I've had a few hundred variations on this way of preparing cucumbers, so obviously I like them a lot; I can't really say much more on that subject!