A Korean Home Cooking Lesson

My favorite thing about being in Korea is the food.  It's healthy, chock full of flavors, and spicy - something I've finally learned to appreciate since travelling.

I was pretty pumped when a Korean mother and friend of ours, Helen, invited Kyle and I over for lunch & a little cooking lesson.  She of course prefaced it all with a humble, something along the lines of "I can't cook everything", but man, she can cook.  And it was super adorable, she had it all set up like a cooking show with all the glass bowls with the foods already prepped: the onions finely chopped, garlic minced, and eggs already cracked.

Here are the results, so you can have a visual of the end goal.  Super delicious!!!
This is a pretty typical Korean meal: a few main dishes some side dishes that you all share and eat family style.  (Yes, it's a lot of work for the women.)  Westerners eating Korean style are sometimes taken aback that you eat out of communal dishes, including one large soup pot.  You eat with a seperate small bowl of rice 1-2 cups and sometimes have a side dish to put small bit of food on.  But in general, you eat with chopsticks & spoon straignt from the serving bowls into your mouth.


First essential part: broth.
Boil about 2 liters of water the ingredients for 20 minutes, then pull out ingredients for a clear broth.
1. about 20 dried anchovies
2. about 5 dried whole mushrooms
3. tangul (tashima in Korean) - it's sort of a hard, thick seaweed
4. 2 large whole radishes cut into large pieces

With the broth we made two yummy dishes, steamed eggs and a red bean soup.


Steamed Eggs
I've never steamed eggs before, but they make them pretty delicious here.  It's basically mix the eggs and ingredients into a bowl & put it into a double boiler or the lovely, Korean steam oven (180'C~ 150'F).
1. diced onion & green onion
2. tea spoon salt
3. 3 eggs
4. soft tofu
5. 1 ladel of broth, or I suppose any liquid.


Red Bean Jigae or Soup
Use the remaing 2 liters of broth for the base of the soup.  First use a small, fine strainer and add red bean paste into the broth so that only the flavoring of the beans go into the broth, but none of the bean skins or pieces go into the broth.  The broth should stay clean of bean parts.  Boil the broth with all the ingredients about 20 minutes.

1. use about 1.5 cups of red bean paste
2. 1 cup cut zuccini
3. firm tofu
3. hot peppers for flavor (and only if you're Kyle, you can eat them)
4. red hot pepper powder to taste
5. about a tablespoon of minced garlic or to taste

additional veggies are optional: onion, shiregi (the boiled green part of radishes), etc)


Plum Sauce Pork
Marinade over night, pork pieces with plum sauce, spices and veggies.  Then cook (no oil) in a teflon pan, stirring frequently.  Serve with whole pieces of lettuce to wrap the meat into bite sized pieces.

1. large pieces of 3-4 onions
2. 1 tablespoon of minced garlic or to taste
3. plum sauce
4. 1 red spicy pepper to taste
5. tea spoon red pepper powder
6. 1-2 table spoons red pepper paste, for more spicy flavor



Sorry for the lack of photos - hopefully we'll do it again sometime and I'll take more, especially one with Helen.  If I try these in my own kitchen, maybe I'll take some embarassing photos!  :)  If I can come back cooking one or two Korean dishes, I'll be so happy.

Thanks for the yummy lunch, Helen!