My friend Amy put up a recipe for spicy coconut-glazed winter vegetables on her blog as she has this idea to cut back on the wine while eating vegetables. WTF? Cut back on the sweet sweet booze? That would make Karl and Ronny cry.

I decided to field-testing this recipe for a couple of reasons, the least of which being that I happen to have a can of coconut milk that I wasn’t too sure what to do with. I’m not all that into vegetarian mains, but the dish looked good and seemed like a tasty alternative to the standard sides one makes with roasts.

Ingredients and instructions

This is the complete recipe verbatim from Amy’s post. Seems simple enough that her monkey could do it (assuming she had a monkey, which she doesn’t).

• 4 baby carrots. Sliced in half, diced 1/2-inch
• 20 Brussel sprouts. Outer leaves removed, stems cut off, cut in half
• 1 shallot, sliced thinly
• 1 baby egg plant. Sliced into 1/2-inch rounds, then into wedges
• 6 shiitake mushrooms, sliced 1/2-inch wide
• 2 green onions, green tops only, diced 1/2-inch
• 2-3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1/4 cup of coconut milk
• 1-2 teaspoons of Sriracha hot sauce (or more!)
• Salt

Preheat oven to 400ºF. Add all vegetables (in a single layer – crowding o.k.) into a ceramic baking dish. Toss vegetables with olive oil and season with salt. Bake for 15 minutes. Stir. Remove vegetables from oven and add sirracha and coconut milk. Stir to coat and put back in the oven for another 15 minutes until vegetables are tender. Re-season if necessary.

Execution

There’s not much to say: she wrote a really clear recipe. Since it’s after the XMas period, there’s not a whole lot of demand for Brussel sprouts, making the sourcing of nice ones somewhat difficult. Prep time too all of about 10 minutes, with most of it used to clean the sprouts. The coconut milk and sriracha were mixed together before being added to the vegetables.

For the amount of ingredients I had on hand and with my oven, cooking time ran closer to 40 minutes total. The addition of coconut milk resulted in a lot of liquid ejected from the vegetables at the 30 minute mark, but the additional 10 minutes evaporated most of the liquid leaving a fairly viscous light orange sauce.

Impressions

Well, it looked pretty close to the display image.

Looks aside, this is not a recipe for spice weenies. I personally like the hot: sriracha gives a nice little tingle and it’s got that slightly garlicky zip that makes it go with mostly anything. What happens in this recipe is that the different vegetables react differently to the milk/sriracha mixture, which results in an interesting eating experience: the carrots get a glaze (and are the mildest), the eggplant partially absorbs, and the Brussel sprouts get most of the sriracha hit as the liquid works its way between the layers of the spouts.

All in all though, it’s a tasty dish and I’ll keep it in my repertoire since my vegetarian offerings are slim-to-none. However, I think I’m too carnivorous to just eat this as a main: even though this recipe carries umami, I can eat both portions and still feel peckish for protein. I have decided that my original thought of it as a potential side is not appropriate as the coconut element makes it difficult to match with a roast beast. Maybe some pork filet, or some type of fairly robust grilled fish. Or octopus. I could see myself offering this up as the vegetable course in a tasting menu progression.

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