Raw Bento

I’m on a Korean kick lately. Three reasons why I love Korean food: spicy, full of garlic, and just downright hearty. Oh and kimchi…I heart kimchi anything.

Since I bought some Korean pastes like hot pepper (gochuchang) and fermented soy bean (doenjang), I thought I would flex my culinary muscles. It’s been a while since I got so excited in the kitchen. While I have a few cooked Korean dishes that I’m planning to veganize, I had a brain wave one afternoon to do a raw vegan bibimbap, which is essentially a Korean rice bowl with veggies that is topped with an egg and/or meat plus a dollop of gochuchang. Typically, the rice bowl is a hot-stone bowl that gives the rice a charred texture, much like paella, but we ain’t doin’ no charrin’ today, my friends…

I present you a delicious bowl of Asian flavours…

Of course I had kimchi on the side!! This recipe is quite time-consuming in my book. It takes about 30 minutes to chop everything and that doesn’t include marinating time for the shiitake mushrooms and bean sprouts.

Recipe:
1/2 head of cauliflower (pulverized into rice grain-sized bits by a food processor)
1/4 carrot, julienned
1/2 cucumber, julienned
1 cup spinach (cut in chiffonade style, ie. long and thin)
1/2 cup shiitake (marinated in shoyu, sesame oil and apple cider vinegar for an hour)
1/2 cup bean sprouts (marinated in shoyu, sesame oil, chopped garlic and apple cider vinegar for an hour)

Arrange everything in a bowl and pour the leftover marinade from the bean sprouts, including the chopped garlic. Top the bowl with some gochuchang — I would recommend one tablespoon if you want a more Korean-like flavour so my teaspoonful wasn’t actually enough but I poured my kimchi into the bowl halfway through so it tasted a little bit more Korean.

Mix it up — much like a salad.

Does it taste like bibimbap? Nope, sorry folks but the visual effect shook things up enough for me to feel like it’s a new fangled dish in my spartan kitchen.

I love salads but sometimes looking at the same old gets boring.