Trying new ingredients: baby bok choy and hoisin sauce

Continuing a theme from our recent Asian noodle soup and its revamped counterpart from previous weeks, we recently put together another Asian themed meal, again using ingredients we've never had the opportunity to use before.

This one's actually pretty easy and only has a small number of ingredients: baby bok choy, pork chops, sushi rice, hoisin sauce, cola, rice wine vinegar (you only need a splash at the end) and salt and pepper.

If you recall from the soup we made before, Megan wasn't big on the new ingredients we tried, especially the bok choy. With that in mind we decided to try baby bok choy, which is both more aesthetically pleasing and has a different flavor.

To start our meal, we cut the baby bok choy in half, as they will be cooked whole instead of diced.

We cooked each piece with the inside facing down to bring out the vegetable's natural flavor.

After heating through, we pulled off the baby bok choy, seasoned our pork chops with salt and pepper, and cooked them through briefly.

The pork chops are also removed from the heat, then we mix together the cola and hoisin sauce and cook it in the same skillet. If you haven't tried hoisin sauce before, it has a distinctly Chinese style flavor, but with a little sweetness courtesy of licorice root. It's an interesting flavor you won't find elsewhere, and I recommend giving it a shot.

After the sauce is whisked together, we throw the pork chops back into the skillet to be coated in the sauce.

To finish it off we lay everything down with a bed of cooked sushi rice, which we splash with rice wine vinegar. Spoon some extra sauce over everything and you've got a quick and off-beat but very tasty dinner!