Day 4 - Korea - World Cup Eating Challenge 2015

I'm going to say something kind of controversial... I don't like Korean food.

Ok, I'm glad I got that off my chest. Despite not liking Korean food though - I still added to my list. This challenge isn't about eating what I like or could have every day. It's about pushing the boundaries, trying new things, and opening my experiences. So while I may not opt for the kimchi or Korean short ribs, I can't imagine not finding anything I'd be willing to try to make.

I did a little Pinterest search for Paleo Korean food and came across this recipe which seemed perfect.

Looking at it, it's obviously not Paleo but the idea was there so I decided to go with it. I replaced the sugar with a tablespoon of honey. I left out the sesame oil because I have a mild allergy to it. For the chili garlic sauce, I was a little stumped. I figured I could find something at the grocery store and the best I came up with was a chili lime garlic marinade. Reading the ingredients was disapointing but I figured it would be ok in such a small quantity in the sauce and I wanted the flavors to be right.

I added the sauce mixture to my ground beef and put in on low in the crock pot for 4 hours. During that time I thought about this chili lime sauce debacle again. It seemed to weird to have a marinade as the ingredient. And then I looked at the picture in the recipe... and there was clearly a bottle or sriracha in the background. Well, that made more sense. While I know using sriracha would have made it taste better and more authentic, it's probably better I made the mix up as Dan doesn't like spicy food. 

The nice thing is that I was able to add it as a topping! I also chopped up some green and red onions, cucumber, and grated some carrots.

This was all served on leaves of Romaine lettuce. I really just loved how all of the colors from the veggies made everything pop! My favorite thing about eating Paleo is how colorful fresh vegetables are.

I also added a little sriracha on top. I definitely feel like that would have made this dish just fantastic. The beef turned out ok but I know it was that over processed marinade that kept it from being better. 

All in all though, I really liked this dish. The previous few days had a lot of heavy food so having something that was mostly vegetable was a nice change. Maybe Korean food isn't so bad after all? I have some friends who really want to get Korean BBQ. I'm a lot more open to going with them now!