This is the second recipe I cooked from the epic prep 'n' freeze session of a few weeks ago. Of course, in the recipe listing, it's simply Asian Lettuce Wraps, but I feel compelled to put the "asian" in sarcasm quotes every time I mention it.
The ingredients: a pound of ground pork, red sweet pepper, grated carrots, some ketchup (!), soy sauce. I vaguely remember tossing in some dried red chili, but I can't taste it. Mostly, it tastes like pork-based Sloppy Joes — not offensive enough to be bad, exactly, but not terribly Asian either.
I do like having the meat on a bed of lettuce instead of some starch or another. The recipe called for iceberg lettuce, but I'm not a fan, so I used Boston lettuce instead. I've been bringing two dishes to work: the plastic square dish you can see in the photo above, with just the lettuce in it, and my trusty pyrex round dish for the meat so it can be warmed in the microwave. Once the meat is heated through, I dump it on top of the lettuce and enjoy. I suspect eating it in lettuce cups as the recipe calls for would be messy, so I've just been having it as a sort of salad.
Next time, I think I'm going to add some Lee Kum Kee chili garlic sauce in addition to, or in place of, the ketchup. I'd like to drop the meat mixture on top of a bed of bean sprouts and thin rice noodles, maybe with some fresh mint leaves, but I think that's too elaborate for a work lunch.
I used the maximum prescribed cooking time again. At the end, all of the flavouring bits were at the bottom of the pot, and the meat was sitting on top, virtually unseasoned. The photo above shows how things looked after I gave the mixture a stir. I set the pot to cook on high for an hour and left the lid off, just giving the occasional stir whenever I was in the kitchen. That boiled off the excess water and let the flavours cook in a bit.
So yes, I do plan to make this again, but it's going to need tweaking, and while it's a nice dish, I don't think I'm ever going to be comfortable with calling it Asian.
