SheenaGreena

I remember a few months ago my mother and I watching something on Korean television (on a weekly health documentary) about how drinking vinegar is supposed to be good for you. So of course after watching it my mother and I bought some brown rice vinegar and mixed it with water. Its actually pretty refreshing and I've even made gaennip vinegar for fun. I've heard persimmon vinegar is good as well, but I still haven't tried that. Tell me how your "lemongrass herbal vinegar" tastes (thats what it says in korean)

Koreans also eat raw chiles, but not so much as a main component of a meal as the Bhutanese do. We take spicy raw chiles and dip them in gochujang (hot chile paste which isn't that spicy) daejjang, or a combo of the two. Korean food is spicy, but the stuff you eat at restaurants isn't as spicy as korean home cooking. I've had many a kimchi (made by my mother and her friends) that is made with fresh gochugaru that is WAY spicier than kimchi made with store bought gochugaru. Also one of the spiciest dishes I have ever eaten in my life was some nakji bokkeum that was made by a family friend. Delicious and painful. Although I am sure there are many countries out there with even hotter cuisines

I think it may be just particular meat and peanut butter pairings. I know that a nice chicken satay with a thai spicy peanut sauce is quite delicious. Then again, there's more than just peanut butter in the sauce. ← so true, you can't beat good "peanut sauce", but straight, cooked, pb on an overly salty ham is just nasty

ahhh meat and peanut butter, I'll never understand the correlation honestly

Wife was Korean, husband was full blown white American...no excuses (: hehe just kidding. I really do love this couple, the husband just served the worst dinner ever to me is all.

what's SMAP? If I could take a look at it I could tell you. wow i just finished watching teppan shojo akane and I hated it ): so boring and such a terrible ending. For now I'll watch korean food dramas until more subtitled osen comes out

I've sure this has been posted elsewhere, but I love roasting canned chickpeas on a tray till they get nice and crispy. toss them with some spices and dried herbs, and you have a tasty beer snack

I guess I should've posted this a few weeks ago, but I recently had the WORST meal ever at a family friend's house. I cooked Christmas dinner this year for these family friends, so they thought they would return the favor by cooking a delicious New Year's Day meal. Of course I was expecting only the best, because the wife cooks the most amazing Korean food. This lady sends fresh kimchi down to me all the time and the best Nakji Bokkeum I have ever had. Also her husband "apparently" loves to cook. He gets regular subscriptions to various food magazines and has an extensive cookbook collection. He has even given me some great cookbooks as well and back issues of Gourmet magazine. So anyways I end up going to their house with my parents expecting a tasty meal. I arrive at about 2pm and see corn, broccoli,green beans and mashed potatoes on the table. It's obvious the corn is from a can, it has that awful pale yellow color. The broccoli is also grayish green and in tiny tiny pieces. Obviously previously frozen and boiled in water for over 15 mins. The green beans were also previously frozen and very limp. Every time I bit down on one, green bean water squirted everywhere. To top it all off, all veggies were ice cold and had NO salt or pepper or butter - bad. The mashed potatoes were also equally crappy and tasted like they had been mashed with water, not butter and cream ): Of course on the side they served gravy out of the jar. It was extra shiny from the cornstarch thickener. Haha, my father used that gravy on top of all of the veggies, because of the lack of salt. It was pretty entertaining seeing him liberally douse his broccoli with gloopy gravy. However the best/awful part of the meal was the ham. I was chewing down on a slice of ice cold ham when all of a sudden I taste something strangely familiar. Holy crap, it was peanut butter! They rubbed the ENTIRE outside of the ham with peanut butter. Is that a regional thing or what? It was such a nasty combination too. I know ham and sweet stuff go hand in hand...but not ham and peanut butter ): Also cooked peanut butter has to be the nastiest thing ever. Although I imagine a peanut butter and bacon sandwich to be absolutely delicious! Luckily this couple is incredibly sweet and kind and I appreciated the meal, but I am NEVER going back for a meal that is not Korean in origin. ETA: maybe the best part of the meal was the two parrots in the back room screaming in Korean throughout the meal?

I did Peruvian chicken twice during my last period (a week or 2 ago). AMAZING, hot crispy chicken skin with moist meat, creamy coleslaw, crispy french fries, and those tasty dips - green peppers, and that yellowy mayo. HOORAY for crispy chicken skin!

I love cooking kimchi with pork on the bbq grill. It's very popular at this chain of restaurants here in the states called "Honey Pig". They even cook the pork with butter and it is so unbelievably bad for you. Sometimes I will put tofu on the grill with the kimchi and the pork, unfortunately it looks kinda unappetizing and my mother tends to call it "dog food" ):

my favorite thing to do with kkaenip is to stir the whole leaves into hot maeuntang (spicy fish soup). They are also good wrapped around flounder sashimi with chogojuchang. I am not a fan of sesame oil when it comes to ssam. I much prefer daengjang. I like to use these weird leaves (don't know what the name is) that taste kind of bitter and look like pumpkin leaves to wrap around grilled samgyupsal. I also love that green onion salad and grilled garlic. I'm so happy that i'm part Korean <3

Yeah I'm not a fan of pickled moo or rice with ssam. I prefer pickled radish with fried chicken. Yeah you can buy live oysters and shuck them yourself, but in our family we are lazy and prefer the frozen oysters. (: It's easier and there is no cleanup I never heard of mixing baekseju with soju...that sounds kinda gross ): I am not a huge fan of baekseju and much prefer soju because it tastes great with all korean food. We actually mix the soju with lemon juice because we are wusses. she salts it when she adds the rest of the seasonings. I dont think she adds any vinegar (at least she said she didn't). I'll ask her again tomorrow after she wakes up here's a pic thats similar to the bossam that I ate bossam

sure, you just take some pork belly and boil it in water flavored with onions, garlic, spoonful of daengjang paste, and some ginger. I would just add each to taste. Boil it until the meat is cooked all the way. Then take some napa cabbage and salt it overnight or for 12 hours. When you are ready to eat the cabbage you have to make sure to rinse it and wring it out...or it will be too salty. For the radish, just see my reply to nakji (sorry for the lack of measurements). Lastly just buy a packet of frozen raw oysters and thaw them out. Rinse them with salt (I don't know what this does, but my mother does it) before eating. It's pretty darn easy to put all of this together and very tasty to eat.

nakji, my mom shreds the radish, marinates it with gochugaru for an hour to "color" it, add garlic, green onion, salt, and a tiny bit of sugar. Sorry there are no measurements...you know how Korean women are btw what's oship oship (50 50)? a drinking game?

I had bossam the other day (yesterday) for dinner. For those who don't know, it's slices of boiled pork that's eaten with salted napa cabbage leaves, marinated radish strips, and raw oysters. Sounds like a strange combination, but they all go extremely well with each other. Here's the set up: we have homemade daengjang on the lower left hand corner (my mother makes it homemade and adds ground up onion to it to make a smoother more dippable consistency). Above that we have a bowl of sliced korean chiles (home grown) for dipping into the daengjang or adding to the ssam. Above that is saeojutt, which is salted baby shrimp. You add them to the pork if you want some extra saltiness. To the right of the chiles is the marinated or "kimchied" radish that you add to the ssam. Above the radish is just some kimchi. Here's my plate. We have heavily salted and rinsed napa cabbage, sliced pork (that was cooked with water, onions, garlic, ginger, and daengjang), and some raw oysters. btw sorry for the awful pics, I used my webcam on my macbook. It's hard to use an entire laptop to take pics at the dinner table here's the setup: cabbage, pork, oyster, radish Not bossam, but I also ate this lovely combination: soy sauce pickled sesame leaves with pork and daengjang. Last but not least, you can't have a tasty korean meal without this:

Am I the only one that mixes my curry with my rice when I eat it? I've seen little korean kids do this on tv and am wondering if that is also another difference between korean curry and japanese curry. I know that in Japan you don't do this, and I would probably get smacked on the side of my head for it (: Oh and Japanese like to eat pickles with their curries and Koreans like to eat kimchi (of course) with their curry. I like to put some rice in a bowl, dump a whole lot of curry (extra sauce) on top of the rice and eat it with chonggak kimchi or gakkdugi on the side. I think cold crunchy food tastes good with curry

yep, nothing's better than roasted chestnuts. I came up with the brilliant idea on friday that my mother and I should grill on charcoal. We marinated some squid in the marinade that is used on both nakji bokum and ojingeo bokum. Good stuff. Well after we were done I said why not throw some sweet potatoes on the grill? They were perfectly done after an hour, but weren't as sweet as they could've been. We also wanted to do some chestnuts, but had to save them for my little sister ): She's flying in in 2 weeks and wants us to save some so she can eat them. Luckily we have a family friend with a chestnut tree who brings us bags of them in the fall. The other week I even tried a Japanese recipe with my mother where we added chestnuts to sweet glutinous rice. She is not a big fan of eating non Korean food, so she was skeptical, but she loved it. We even added ginko nuts to it that we had picked ourselves. STINKY stuff.

ewwww tomato and pear dokbokgi. ): I would just take some fish broth (traditionally you use broth from odaeng, which I believe is similar to oden) and add some gochujang to it. Pretty easy You can add pieces of fish cake to it too and whole hard boiled eggs. Tastes best eaten outdoors at some ajummas hut on a cold cold day on top of a plastic bag covered plate eaten with toothpicks (:

hi kristin, I was going to say the same thing about namdaemun. I forgot how much they were, but I remember my mom buying one in 2003 over there. I'll ask much it cost btw. happy hunting, and is this your first time in korea? I remember saying how much you've wanted to go there and couldn't remember if you've been over there. lucky thing is it's a nice 2 hour trip (:

I'm trying to figure out how this is used in Korean cooking. I know that it's used extensively in japanese cooking, but I want to know how the Koreans use it. I am curious, because I want to try it in some Korean applications. Also, does anyone know how many carbs are in it?

a broken blender? I use the shaker that comes with the stuff and it works really well. Here's a pic of the shaker

I make those japanese hamburgers quite often. I make them with either 100% chicken or 100% turkey bc I can get it at the military base for less than $2 a package (pound). very very cheap. I don't know if it's authentic, but I add ponzu, garlic, lots of ginger, pepper, and sometimes an egg yolk.

a blendtec blender is one of the best blenders around. there are some youtube videos around where some guy will throw crap in it to blend like ipods, gold clubs, golf balls, etc. Yes they all turn into powder in the end....guess I just answered my own question.

we BOTH need to move to korea. It doesn't help that I get KBS world here and every single damn tv show shows the most AMAZING food. Ugh god take me back to the mother land. anyways............. thanks for all of the great suggestions. I will be sure to run it by my mom. I think we're gonna make a fun little project with this. Hey maybe we can start our own business? (yeah right). also do you think a blendtec blender is fine for grinding grains? I know it's powerful and all but maybe you need a more specialized "machine"? eta: god that bulgogi burger looks so gross/delicious ): I wish there was a way to keep misutgaru emulsified? I constantly have to shake it to keep it evenly dispersed throughout.

they were on oprah today but I didn't watch...too much damn homework