Sweet & Savory Carrots & Pork

I know I shared another carrot dish last week, but this one has been a recent favorite in our household. The preparation method is somewhere between a stew and stir-fry, and the sweet and savory hoisin sauce transforms the simple ingredients into something decadent and flavorful.

Hoisin sauce is a Chinese condiment made from fermented soybean paste and spices like fennel and star anise. You're most likely to see it served as a condiment for Peking Duck or Pho, but it's a fantastic seasoning for stir-fries as well.

In this dish, it pairs up with sweet, tender carrots and ground pork to make an easy entre that's sure to be a hit, even if you have some carrot haters in the house.

I like cutting the carrots using an oblique cut, which is known as rangiri in Japanese. To do it, you simply cut a piece of carrot off at a 45 degree angle, turn the carrot on it's center axis 45 degrees and then make another cut at the sample angle. This ensures all the pieces are roughly the same size regardless of what end of the carrot you cut them from.