Spicy Korean-sauced Corn & Green Bean Skillet

Nearly a Korean Succotash, this skillet side dish of fresh corn and green beans is spiced up with a teriyaki and gochujang sauce.

Moving to Ohio I understood that I'd be living in a more rural area. Shoot, I drive past 3 farms just taking my daughter to sewing school [she made a medieval dress last week at camp--how cool is that?].

This fact reminds me of when I joined the Air Force to see the world. This suburbanite drove past 13 barns (!) en route to work each day. Quite a shift from the beltway and subway commutes I'd been used to, so I'd say I did see more of the world even before moving overseas and deploying.

What I hadn't expected in Ohio, and what was a happy surprise, was all the farm produce that appears every summer in addition to our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share. There's a wagon with a red striped awning that parks next to a Tim Horton's with produce each week. A flat trailer that appears with corn in a shady area of a strip mall lot. A 'peach truck' I just heard about from a fellow band parent (but haven't seen yet--saving that for next year). And of course our local farmer's market, a few blocks down the street on Saturday mornings. Thanks to these folks I am able to squirrel away plenty of corn for winter while still enjoying some ears fresh.

note to self--get a pedicure before next farm share box photo

For more recipes using corn, please see my Recipes Using Corn Collection. For more using green beans, please see my Green Bean Recipes Collection. These are part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient, a resource for folks like me eating from the farm share, the abundance of fresh produce in my community, and from generous neighbors. I'm on a Corn Sweet Corn Pinterest board with loads of ideas from around the web, follow that for more ideas or follow me in general for all of my pins. Want to know how to use this blog? Click here.



This year I keep making mixtures of corn and green beans since our farmers are doing such a terrific job of growing beans (and staying out past dark picking 200 ears of corn from their friends to include in our boxes). I figured I'd get another side dish from last year up on the blog, before the newer dishes trip over it in their haste to be published. Yeah, my recipes are as unruly as Simon, Vincent and Robert Barker anticipating mealtime. 

After I made Grilled Korean-seasoned Chicken Thighs and Bok Choy I had some leftover sauce. I used this over a skillet-cooked corn and green bean blend from the farm share. It was lovely on its own, with rice an eggs for a meatless meal, as well as with leftover grilled chicken (all the ways my family ate it).

Note: You don't need to make all that other recipe first, though. I've cut down the proportions of sauce ingredients below if you want to make just enough for one side dish. The trickiest-to-find ingredient, gochujang, comes in a tub in my commissary and large Kroger, as well as in bottles in the grocery store down the street. I've got a picture of the tub below, and the jars in my original post using gochujang, and here's an Amazon affiliate link so you know what you're looking for.

use this photo for the sauce ingredients only--pay no attention to the bok choy and chicken

For the sauce
2½ Tablespoons teriyaki sauce
4 teaspoons seasoned rice vinegar
1 Tablespoons sesame oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1 Tablespoon chopped yellow onion
1 teaspoon toasted sesame seed blend
¼ teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
4 teaspoons gochujang (see Note)

Whisk together sauce ingredients in a bowl. Pour into a saucepan and bring to a boil for 5 minutes, then remove from heat.

Spicy Korean-sauced Corn & Green Bean Skillet

2 cups green beans that have been trimmed to bite sized pieces
kernels cut off from 1 ear of corn (about 2 cups--it was a big ear)
1 Tablespoon butter or buttery spread
¼ cup sauce (see above)
toasted sesame seeds to serve
serves 4

Preheat a large skillet over medium heat and add the butter.  When it has melted, add the beans and stir to coat with fat. After 3 minutes (the amount of time it took me to prep the corn) add the corn and stir again. Cover at cook for 5 minutes until the vegetables are slightly tender. Pour the sauce over top, stir to coat, and simmer another 3 to 5 minutes until the sauce is clinging to the vegetables and the vegetables are tender. To serve, add a pinch of toasted sesame seeds on top. Serve warm.