Looking back over the previous editions of Wednesday Brunch here at Beach City Cooking, one thing I've noticed is that, so far, I've pretty much only been posting breakfast-y dishes for this weekly feature. Personally, 9 times out of 10, if a brunch menu is put in front of me, I'll order a breakfast item as opposed to something lunch-like. In that rare instance where I opt for something you'd see me eating at lunch, it's got to be really unusual and special.
I think the reason that I'd typically always go for breakfast when given the choice, is that when it comes down to it, if you really press me and demand to know (or, if you just happen to be reading this blog post, I guess!) I'd have to tell you that breakfast is not only my favorite meal of the day, but also my favorite category of food. What I love about breakfast is its paradoxical combination of relatively few core dishes and infinite possible permutations of those dishes. Lunch and dinner are, for the most part, interchangeable. Breakfast is something fascinating and unique that permeates most food cultures and showcases the incredible number of ways the egg can be at the center of a cheap and delicious meal.
More exulting the virtues of breakfast another day--today, let's talk about a delicious brunch recipe that would fall into the lunch category and not the breakfast one. The recipe for today's Cold Sweet Potato Noodle Salad comes from Morsels and Musings, and oh, what a cool and refreshing dish it is. The clear, relatively light sweet potato starch-based noodles, pear, and carrot serve as satisfying foils for the sweet, honey and mirin-based sauce. There was no daikon, cucumber, or kimchi on hand in our kitchen, so those weren't in my own version of the salad--but it would be untrue to say it felt like the dish was missing something without them.
The other thing absent from my execution of the dish was a Nashi pear, oftentimes known as an Asian pear. (And by "oftentimes," what I really mean is that I only learned the proper name for an Asian pear when I read the recipe for this dish the other night.) After some research online, I found out that a firm regular old pear, a Bartlett in this case, is a perfectly cool substitution to make in this case. We're light on pictures here today, but only because I'm resisting the urge to post the Bento version of this salad, which Jen took for lunch earlier this week. So this post will end here, but it's most definitely To Be Continued... in tomorrow's Weekly Bento Round-Up. There, you'll find out how I packed the salad compactly and without getting the dangmyeon, or sweet potato starch noodles, too soggy by the time Jen would be eating lunch.
Thanks for stopping by Beach City Cooking, and I'll see you all later on for another edition of Thrifty Thursdays! Have a great night, and stay cool!
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