A hunger for namuls

Recently, I've become faintly obsessed with namuls.

I didn't even know until recently just what a namul is, but now I know I like them a LOT.

Namuls are Korean vegetable dishes - they're fairly simple to prepare, using raw or blanched veggies, mixed with typical Korean seasonings like rice vinegar, chilli and soy sauce. I don't know much about Korean food, but I know that it involves all the seasonings I love.

With the weather starting to heat up in London, and the lure of the pub overtaking the lure of the stove, the food I've been craving is namuls. They take five minutes to prepare, the flavours are clean and delicious - what's not to like?

The namuls I've been experimenting with are from my favourite cookbook The Asian Vegan Kitchen. According to Wikipedia, namuls are side dishes, but The Asian Vegan Kitchen reckons they're more main dishes. If you eat three of them in one go, like I've been doing, with a bit of rice on the side, then they're probably a meal in their own right.

Here's the namuls I made recently - cucumber, bean sprouts and asparagus.

One of the things that kind of surprises me about namuls is that the ingredients are so similar but the tastes are so different. All hail vegetables, and their magical properties!

Take this namul here: it's another namul, with all that the namul fixings you'd expect like soy sauce. But this one had ground sesame in (magically transformed by my laziness into tahini) and voila! A whole new dish.

The Asian Vegan Kitchen only has five different namuls, and I think I've cooked them all several times over these past weeks.

Got any namul recipes? Send over here!