Five Spice Pork with Basmati Rice and Spicy Vegetables

So... I got another new plate. I love this plate. I always get like this with new dishes, and never want to use any of the others, at least until the sheen wears off. Isn't it pretty though?

So this. This is a kind of weird combination of the two main components (the meat and the vegetables, that is, the white glare of rice makes it look more important than it is and I could have done without), since the meat is quite Asian in flavour and I guess the vegetables are a little more... American South or something.

The recipe for the vegetables called it an Asian-style Succotash, but I'm not sure what makes them Asian-style, except for the presence of snap peas. What it actually reminded me of was a Spicy Creamed Corn that I made a while back, except without the creamed bit and with some added peas. It was pretty good this way, but I liked it better as creamed corn.

I've made the five spice pork before, but it was a pretty different treatment, hence the new photograph. This was really very good, but I actually preferred it the other way. (See it here. So. Good.) It's slightly too sweet, which is something that I need to work at fixing, without ruining the sauce. You rub the meat with brown sugar and then later top it with Hoisin sauce, which seems to be primarily made of sugar, so it's a pretty heavy hit of sweetness. The sweet really works well with the cinnamon and licorice tastes of the five spice, but I didn't want to go quite so far. Probably I could just scale back the brown sugar a little more without ruining the taste.