Little Dishes #3

 

I was in the mood for Korean food again, but I wanted to explore some new-to-me things. Here we have Nasoya's Plantspired "Honey" Garlic Chick'n, a sesame soy cucumber-carrot salad (recipe veganized from Will Cook for Friends using vegan honey), Korean-style braised purple potatoes with red bell pepper and onions (inspired and roughly in the ballpark of this recipe from Korean Bapsang), broccoli banchan (recipe from Sugar Yums), spinach banchan (recipe from Maangchi), and brown rice with everything bagel seasoning.

I really enjoyed these things! In terms of what this used from the quest to use what I had, this generally focused on the produce I had on hand. I bought the chick'n to make life easier, and it definitely helped; could I have made something? Maybe, but I also didn't have to store anything to get the convenience of that and sometimes that's what one needs. The cucumber-carrot salad used up my cucumbers, while the potatoes used up my purple potatoes, and the spinach finished off my spinach. So it helped to clear things out of my extant stocks, if nothing else.

And I'll note I did get to use a few things that have been lurking in my cabinets for far too long without showing much progress in diminishing themselves: brown rice syrup and rice wine in the potatoes, and gochugaru in the broccoli. So those are wins!

But also, these braised veggies are so good and I would happily make something similar again, so perhaps the rice wine and brown rice syrup will find themselves into a dish in the future.

As an aside, if you want your purple potatoes to stay purple, the key seems to be to not peel them. I have peeled purple potatoes only to make mashed potatoes, which are nowhere near so vibrant as this. But I'm finding that if the peels stay on, the purple stays in.

This was good--so many colors and great flavors, and great make-ahead foods, too.