Vegetables with Korean Style Noodles (Chap Chae)

I have a Korean acquaintance who was recently telling me that he wanted to eat more vegetarian meals, but that traditional Korean cuisine was tough to make vegetarian.

"Nonsense", I said. "Any cuisine can be made vegetarian." Yerp. If you can make German vegetarian dishes (and I've done it), you can do anything, right?

Ok, ok... I found out it's a little tough. Korean vegetarian cuisine is indeed a bit sparce. But I love a good challenge, and I'll be posting Korean vegetarian recipes over the coming weeks, as I find good Korean dishes that work well with meat substitutes (or just without meat, period).

Here's my first offering in the Korean vegetarian recipes category - Vegetables with Korean Style Noodles:

6 oz bean thread noodles (also called glass noodles or mung bean noo)
1/4 cup rice wine
1/4 cup soy sauce or tamari
1 tbsp sesame oil
2 cloves garlic, chopped
3 tbsp sugar
1 tsp hot Korean style chili paste
4 cups chopped fresh spinach
1 large onion, sliced
2 large carrots, cut into 2 inch strips
8 oz shiitake or white mushrooms, sliced

Soak noodles in warm water for 10 minutes to soften, then cook in boiling water for 2 minutes. Drain and rinse with cool water.

Combine sesame soy sauce or tamari, rice wine, garlic, sugar, and chili paste.

Cook onion, carrots, mushrooms, and spinach in a medium pan with sesame oil until tender. Pour soy sauce mixture over vegetables, lower temperature and simmer for an additional 2 to 3 minutes.

Serve vegetables over bean thread noodles.

Notes:

I've found a few recipes for chap chae that call for 1/2 cup or more of tamari or soy sauce. I cut the soy sauce in half and used rice wine to make up the liquid - this takes out quite a bit of sodium. If you wanted to cut out even more sodium, you could use 1/2 cup of rice wine while cooking, and then sprinkle tamari over the vegetables just before serving.

I'm often guilty of placing healthy and quick cooking over authenticity - I try to come up with recipes that are as authentic as possible, while making them healthier and easier to make than the original recipes. That said, I'm told that the authentic Korean version of this recipe would call for dang myun, which is a noodle made with sweet potato starch.

Look, I'm just some hippie from Ohio. Maybe you can find dang myun in your neck of the woods, but I certainly can't come up with it here.

Mediterranean Veggie Wraps

It's been a crazy couple of days. One of my books, How to Sell Your Art, Handmade Crafts, Photographs, and Music Online went to final layout, so it's been a flurry of activity around here... tweaking my bio, trying to get a good headshot for the book, answering emails from the publisher, and so on. Anyway, my eating habits haven't been as..., well, thoughtful as I would have liked. A take out felafel here, a veggie burger there... kind of the vegetarian's version of living on junk food.

Anyway, tonight, I finally had a little bit of time to unwind and be a person again, so I decided to treat my body to something a bit lighter than the questionable fare I've been asking it to live off of lately. I made these delicious Mediterranean veggie wraps with some roasted red pepper hummus. It feels good to be human again.

2 large tortillas
1 medium eggplant, sliced into 1/2 inch thick rounds
sea salt (or table salt)
1/2 red bell pepper, diced
1/2 large cucumber, diced
1 Roma tomato, diced
Sun dried tomato pesto
Balsamic vinegar
Olive oil

Salt the eggplant slices on both sides and let sit for 5 minutes. Pat dry on both sides (the salting takes out the excess moisture and bitterness). Brush with olive oil on one side. Place directly on oven rack, oiled side down, and bake at 400 degrees for 8 minutes. Oil tops of eggplant slices, turn over, let bake for an additional 8 minutes.

Between oiling and turning the eggplant slices, start assembling the wraps. Spread 1 tsp of the pesto on each tortilla; add diced tomato, cucumber, and red pepper.

When the eggplant slices are done, place them on a cutting board and cut into 1/2 inch squares. Place eggplant squares on top of the veggies. Sprinkle balsamic vinegar on top and roll the tortillas into wraps.

I imagine there are quite a few variations of this you could make - these just happened to be items I already had on hand.

These wraps are pretty easy to make - I think if I had planned it a little better (and if my five-year-old daughter wasn't trying to help me with the dicing), I could have probably done these in 20 minutes. As it were, I probably put closer to a half hour into them.

Enjoy!