Korean Japchae

Thanks to HPB healthyMEtv, I saw this cooking video recently which looks pretty easy to prepare, so I decided to cook this for lunch yesterday :)


Before making the dish, I did more research into Korean Japchae recipes and found a number of useful videos on YouTube. Thanks to all the kind Korean ladies who share their recipes. The method used by HPB is the easiest, whereby you can just stir-fry all the ingredients at one go, adding them one by one. In all the other recipes put up by the Korean ladies, the ingredients are stir-fried one by one, dished up, then finally, added to a big metal bowl, and then mixed together by hand. It looks kinda like a Korean salad, but you can also eat as a one-dish meal. I was happy to learn that the sweet potato noodles has zero calorie! :D

I used my Happy Call pot to prepare this dish, instead of my heavy wok :p I took the short cut like HPB's recipe, but instead of stir-frying the spinach, I blanched it and added last as one of the Korean videos I saw suggested against stir-frying spinach. So, I just like to share how I did this dish to show you how easy it is :)

Ingredients
- Chicken fillet (or chicken breast meat), cut into strips
- Soya sauce
- Sesame oil
- Round spinach (or baby spinach)
- Yellow onion, slice
- Shallots (optional), slice
- 1/2 tsp low-sodium salt
- Baked sesame seeds (I baked these last week and kept in the fridge)
- Garlic, slice thinly
- 1 carrot, julienned

Method
1. Marinade chicken with soya sauce and sesame oil.

2. Bring a pot of water to boil, add sweet potato noodles and boil for about 8 mins (follow instructions on packet). Drain noodles and immediately rinse them with tap water. Season with soy sauce and sesame oil.

3. Blanch spinach for about 3 mins. Remove and drain.

4. Add oil, and stir-fry garlic and onions. Fry till onions soften.

5. Add carrots and spring onion. Add chicken. Add salt.

6. Stir-fry until chicken is cooked (color turns opague). Off the heat.

7. Add drained spinach and noodles. Add sesame oil and sesame seeds. Add soya sauce to taste. Mix all the ingredients together. Serve.

Here is one of the recipes I found. It is very comprehensive.

We enjoy the healthy and tasty lunch, which is full of healthy vegetables and noodles :) Although my kid prefers more noodles and less vegetables, I hope slowly she will start to eat more vegetables - as mommies we can only keep trying, right? :)