Sunday I made the Rice Cakes with Pork, Shrimp, Pine Nuts, and Vegetables recipe from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook.

I used the disc-shaped rice cakes for this recipe versus the rod-shaped ones for last week’s gireum tteobokki because that’s what was shown in the picture for the recipe. Otherwise, the ingredients were straightforward. I was happy to have another use for the pine nuts purchased for san choi bao.

The recipe is also fairly standard technique for stir-fries: batches of ingredients are stir-fried separately and then all together at the end. I was worried that the 2 minutes for the rice cakes and sauce wouldn’t be long enough given Kenji’s emphasis for the tteobokki to cook it slowly for a solid 10 minutes for the cakes to soften, but it turned out not be an issue.

I thought the dish was good, though I won’t use pine nuts in the future if I don’t already have them on hand. They’re just too expensive for not that much difference from a chopped substitute nut. I would be perfectly happy with chopped pecans instead. Megan said that she liked this dish better than last week’s tteobokki, so that’s a win. My daughter tried a rice cake from the stir-fry and said it didn’t taste like much, which I can understand. They seem to be more texture than flavor. Overall I think this is a better “meal” dish than the tteobokki.

We’ll make this one again.

I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.