K-Mondays: Korean Food and Why I Make It

I love Korean food. I might say that it's an acquired taste for me, because I really didn't like much foreign taste on my mouth back when I was a kid. Regardless, I started following Korean recipes from online in making my own Korean food. Since then, two staple Korean ingredients are a must buy for me and stays in the fridge for as long as it can. These two staple ingredients are doenjang (bean paste) and gochujang (hot pepper paste). These two are the first, in fact, ingredients that I bought along with anchovy powder. Now, which Korean food did I decide to make with those ingredients? It's doenjang jjigae! You see, I was a huge Marry Me, Mary fan then, and seeing Jang Geun Seuk eat doenjang jjigae happily makes me want to try it. Before I made it though, I went to a Korean restaurant to taste what it should taste like and then tried to make it on my own. After many (and many more) tries of making doenjang jjigae, I found the taste that I like that may or may not be what it originally should taste like. Nonetheless, My family, friends and I are the only ones suffering from my bad doenjang jjigae cooking (if that's the case). 

This is not my first attempt at doenjang jjigae. I ate it with adobo rice (Filipino food), scrambled eggs (American?) and kimchi.

There have been countless of times when my friends, family, and I eat at a Korean restaurant together. One of the basic dishes that we usually order is bibimbap. It's a dish with mostly rice, various vegetables, egg, and sometimes meat, all topped off with a chili sauce made with gochujang and other stuff. I tried making bibimbap for the first time but since my family then was going easy with rice, we bought quinoa and tried out Erwan Heussaff's recipe of quinoa bibimbap. Of course there was no meat, just an egg, kimchi, shiitake mushrooms, spinach, and carrots. 

Ze healthy quinoa bibimbap

During my birthday, we decided to make japchae, a Korean style pancit. Noodles are served on birthdays because it symbolizes long life, and so why not make it Korean style? My sister and I have been making japchae whenever we have the chance to buy the potato starch noodles in the Korean store. This time, we made it chicken meat instead of beef.

Japchae for long life on my birthday!

When I was alone in our house back in Dubai and I didn't have anything to eat for breakfast, I made my own with the ingredients in sight. I bought gim or laver or nori to add to any rice dishes and my sister had bought her favorite yellow pickled radish just to eat as a side dish. Because of that, I had ingredients in making kimbap! The biggest struggle for me in making this dish was that I didn't have the thing that you roll it in. I just did my best in rolling the stuff and ta-da! Tuna kimbap! There were also left over gim so I made a jumug bap the next day and even bought some gim to my friends house and we made kimbap together.

This one's my kimbap, with the right side set overflowing with tuna.

Lastly, the main reason why I continue on making Korean food and satisfying my cravings is because I usually watch and re-watch episodes of Family Outing and Running Man. Family Outing definitely brought out the hungry Korean inside of me because of their cooking in every episode. Even though I haven't exactly made maeuntang (spicy fish soup), which they usually make in FO, the show always had me thinking of what Korean dish to cook next. On the other hand, Running Man sometimes have food episodes where they eat in a manner which makes the viewers hungry. In fact, I made patbingsoo because of one episode where they went to a market and ate it during summer. 

There is one last Korean dish that is hard for me to make because of the ingredients and that is ttukbeokki. Premade rice cakes are hard to find and if you buy it, you have to eat it right away that's why I've made ttukbeokki just twice. Another ingredient in ttukbeokki, which is eomuk (fish cake), is now a need in our fridge because my mom and sister loved it when I made spicy stir-fried fish cake.

Ttukbeokki with fish cake, eggs, and hotdogs.

My cravings for Korean food still haven't stopped and now that I'm in the Philippines and I found a nearby Korean grocery store, I'm looking forward to making more Korean food based from online recipes. The next dish that I'm attempting to make is budae jjigae (army base soup), mainly because I watched Daesung's episode (in Running Man) again and they made it in that episode. I tried making it last night but there was just a lack of ingredients (no kimchi ;_;) so I thought it wasn't much a budae jjigae as it was a light ttukbeokki without ttuk (rice cake).