Seoul Food | Budae Jjigae 부대찌개

Our fridge looked so Korean I couldn't not take a photo (ignore the spilled yoghurt, oops)

This is just a very brief post to share one of my favourite things to cook. Budae Jjigae, or "Army Base Stew" is one of these beautiful inventions made by people who miss their home's food, but can't quite get the right ingredients. So, during the war there was a lot of "American" food, like Spam and sausages, as well as filling, convenient foods like instant ramen and rice cakes.

I love budae jjigae because it's one of these "one-pot" recipes where you kind of just throw everything in and hope for the best. It's hearty, filling, and (when I make it at least. I've had some pretty volcanic jjigae before) just spicy enough to warm you up and give you some energy.

I'm pretty proud of this one, because it was the first time making a Korean-style stock rather than just using water or a stock cube, and also because I had to touch those dried anchovies. I'm notoriously squeamish about touching things, so when I saw that the recipe called for me to rip off their heads and scrape out the guts I was a little bit horrified. But I did it.

As ever, I used Maangchi's recipe, which worked a charm and it tasted just as good as the budae jjigae I've had as part of our school dinners (which are delicious). I usually make a huge pot with enough for maybe 6 people, so that there's enough for the two of us to have a second helping and I don't have to cook the next day...but usually we end up pigging out and there's only enough to eat a much smaller portion the day after, hahaha. It's too delicious ㅠㅠ

Little Things

A little post about little things in Spring that made us happy, that wouldn't warrant a whole blog post but are nice enough to share.

Firstly, macarons and excellent drinks at our favourite little cafe, The Ark, not far from the underground market in Bupyeong.

...and it was all yellow (8)

Post-Christmas Rush

UPDATE: I've just found this tucked away in my drafts more than a month after I'd written it. I don't know why I never posted it!

It feels like I haven't posted anything in ages, but I've realised that actually it's only been about 2 weeks so now I a) don't feel bad but also b) am quite horrified at how quickly time feels like it's going by. It's been a busy 2-3 weeks though, so I hope you'll let me off.

So, the weekend after Christmas we finally had a chance to meet up with our Orientation friends. What cruelty is this, giving us friends then making them live in all different corners of the country?

We met up with Cherie, who had to come via Seoul anyway, and got on the train to Hongseong. What we didn't realise, is that Hongseong is actually REALLY FAR AWAY. Also, the fact that we'd be buying proper train tickets, not paying with our subway cards. (Maybe everyone else knew this, but I didn't, haha)

The result was us buying tickets for a train that was ages away, and not getting reserved seats because a) it's the super busy winter period on a weekend and b) we didn't think it'd be that long of a journey. Oops. (I seem to be really enjoying lettered lists today, sorry)

2 or 3 hours later, and several hours late, we finally reached Justin's place (after an exciting, frosty walk in possibly the most remote place I've been to in Korea so far, although that's not saying much)

We ate food and tried to make gummy bear soju (red was great, green...not so much), and mug cakes (which we ended up being too full to eat) and generally made the most of the toasty ondol. We ended up staying the night and heading back very early the next morning before the sun was even up.

Thanksgiving

After a rushed and confusing first trip to Costco, several hours of late-night dough preparation, and an early start, I found myself somehow sitting bleary-eyed and only half awake on the subway. Presumably Nick just guided me the entire way as I clutched my unnecessarily large bowl of dough still rising, and a heavy bag of the most blueberries and cream cheese I've ever owned.

We finally arrived at the Global English House, cold and only slightly more awake, and stumbled up the stairs to friendly faces and the best kitchen smells a weary traveller can experience.

Embellishment aside, there was a vat of mulled cider heating on the stove, filled with oranges, cinnamon, and a variety of other things filling the room with seasonal smells. Combined with an array of baked and baking things and the soft daylight that seems to always fill the kitchen, it really does feel like we've left Korea entirely.

I know I've always said that I don't really like Christmas, but I've never been shy to declare my love of Christmas food. Theoretically we were here to celebrate Thanksgiving, but it definitely felt like Christmas to me.

The Macy's Day Parade was rewound and played for us to experience the full impact of the event, and I got to work with my dough while we marvelled at the TV. It was...strange.

Affixed to the wall was Erin's military precision planning for each dish, and I started to roll the dough with the largest vodka bottle I've ever seen.

Braid assembled, 3 different pans of stuffing ready to go, and all manner of autumn vegetables sliced, diced, boiled and prepared and ready to eat. My braid went in the oven, (taking on more of a wreath shape due to my poor planning) and we started to move all of the food into the makeshift dining room downstairs.

Seoul Food | 보쌈 Bossam

Preparation!  준비하다

It's a very poorly-kept secret that Nick's favourite food is bossam. It's a slow-cooked pork that you usually eat by wrapping it in a lettuce leaf (쌈) with a bit of that really great sauce I'm always banging on about (쌈장) and maybe some garlic and rice or kimchi or whatever you want really.

It's kind of similar in taste to Filipino sinigang, with a texture similar to pulled pork (pre-pulling), but it can also be a little expensive so we thought why not try cooking it ourselves, seeing as it's so easy to do?

I used a combination of recipes as well as advice from Korean friends, and ended up using:

- 1 onion
- 4 cloves of garlic
- a sizable chunk of belly pork (maybe 300g?)
- a pinky-sized chunk of garlic (basically what I had left from another recipe), chopped finely
- 2 bayleaves
- a sprinkling of peppercorns
- enough water to cover it all
- half a bottle of soju

That last ingredient, soju (Korean rice wine, about 12%) is very important and the aspect most impressed on me by all my sources. Basically, when you boil pork for that long...it stinks. Like, really bad. So, in Korea they add soju which for some reason kills the smell. I'm not sure of the science behind it, but it works and the alcohol cooks off. Due to soju being pretty flavourless (it's like a milder-tasting vodka) there's no flavour left on the meat either!

I suppose you could use white wine (or possibly 'cheap' vodka, which isn't as cheap or nice as soju) and I also saw suggestions stating that a spoonful or two of instant coffee will also do the trick just fine.)

Then, pretty much, you put the slab/s of meat into your boiling water, bring it back to the boil for about 10-20 mins, then turn the heat right down to just about a simmer. Then you leave it. Maybe stir it occasionally, but generally just leave it for about 40 mins to an hour.

So far, I've got the texture down pretty much spot on, but the flavour is lacking and I'm assuming that's just down to experimentation. I tried again a second time and used less water than before, and adding more salt and garlic and it was a lot better. But still not as good as what we've had!

Here's to more experiments in the future :p

Aw yeee

The Saga of the Ovenless Officetel

You may or may not remember me lamenting, when I first moved into this apartment, the distinct lack of an oven. When I'm stressed, I bake, so what am I meant to do now? (The answer is avoid all other chores as usual, and sleep more.)

Anyway, since then I've been trying to find some alternatives to baking that will still produce cakes and other various confections that require an oven. Everyone else says to just buy one on GMarket, but even at the lowest quoted price of about 30,000 won, I don't want to spend all that for something I'll inevitably have to get rid of or leave behind when I leave Korea, not to mention the distinct lack of space we have for appliances.

So, my first adventure was with a banana bread recipe I found that uses a rice cooker. I've baked in a rice cooker before, back when I was big into Yakitate!! Japan and the manga provided a recipe for Azuma's suihanjapan, so I knew it was possible to bake actual bread with a thick crust, but what about a soft, spongey cake?

Turns out that's possible too! It'll take some work, considering baking products are either really hard to find here, or really expensive. In particular, butter and other dairy products aren't too cheap (which is why I'm not just making cheesecakes by the dozen) so the taste to me was a bit...off. It kind of tasted too healthy. I've got a lot of brown sugar now, though (I keep forgetting to cross it off my mental shopping list, so I keep buying more and more bags of the stuff. Oops.) which might help with making the flavour a bit richer. All in all, it was pretty successful.

Now, there's also some sort of weird contraption in the apartment that just looks like either a) a toy or b) a metal box of doom, but either way I was kind of scared by it and so naturally just shoved it into a cupboard and tried to forget about its existence.

But then I had a thought. What if it was an oven? Or a toaster oven? I wasn't sure what a toaster oven was or what it did (other than, presumably, toast things) but I looked for a recipe and lo, toaster oven cupcakes are a thing.

I gave it a dubious whirl, and actually wasn't too disappointed.

They came out patchy and uneven, despite my efforts to rotate the tray and rearrange the cupcakes to sit in certain hotspots, but apparently the hotspots move. Huff.

I tried some though, and they were great. The sugar on top had gone crispy and the improvised bit of lemon juice I'd thrown in didn't really come through as lemon but it did add something nice and sweet. I took the least burnt ones into school the next day and the other teachers in my office said they tasted good, and nobody got sick afterwards, so I can only class that as a success, haha.

And finally, while I know it's not a cake, it's good to know of some other sweets I can whip up if need be, and our lovely friend Rachel inadvertently gave me a great idea. As she was moving back Stateside, she was emptying cupboards and during this process offered us a bag of what looked like cakey doughnut balls. They're made by Shany and came with a promising warning from Rachel that they taste kind of weird, but not in a bad way.

In snack desperation a few days later, I cracked open the bag and started eating and found out that, yes, they do indeed taste "kind of weird, but not in a bad way". They actually tasted kind of familiar and I wasn't sure why. It wasn't just the stale texture. There was something about the flavour and the crispy topping that reminded me of...

Sponge fingers. If there's one thing I've learnt from my Nan and family dinners, it's that sponge-based desserts are delicious and easy to make. So I thought I'd take a risk and make a sort of improvised tiramisu. And what do you know, it worked! The balls of sponge actually made portioning easier than the usual finger-shaped slabs you get, and I've got enough ingredients left over to make at least one more batch.

So, all is not lost in this sad, ovenless life. But I'm going to keep experimenting until I can get myself some decent roast potatoes!

Seoul Food | 찜닭 Jjimdak

So the other day we were helping Ziggy out with some post-production stuff, and so she treated us to dinner (too kind, too kind!) and shared with us the joys of a meal that I'm pretty sure I'll be going back to a lot in the winter.

Jjimdak is a big chicken dish that reminds me a little bit of chicken adobo, but a little tiny bit spicy and...well. More Korean. Throw in some glass noodles (Japchae noodles? Pancit?) and it's soooo good. Very hearty, warm, and filling.

As usual, the banchan dominates the majority of the table

It's enormous, especially for the price. We could definitely have comfortably had one if not two more people eating with us, but we're pigs.

We had bubble tea afterwards, despite my co-teacher's reprimanding that it's super bad for you and will most likely kill you (maybe a slight exaggeration). I'm sorry. I just can't get enough of that chewy boba.

Bonus photo: Dunkin' Desmond.

Culture Class | Fish and Freedom

So this week (ish, I'm behind, good start) has been dedicated to superheroes and fish. I'd mentioned to Nick a while ago that I do actually want to read Wonder Woman at some point so he went and got me the books for the current New 52 series, which has pretty pictures and scantily clad gods and goddesses. Cool.

Also, to my shame, we're continuing with our "Why do you like Avengers so much, the individual films are so much better" education. Having finished Captain America and Thor, we moved onto Winter Soldier this week.

I'm loving Wonder Woman. It's just the right amount of creepy and gory and superhero-y, and the designs are all weird and cool enough that I actually drew some fanart. So you know it's good by my book.

Captain America was pretty good, a nice balance of funny and "omg nooooo!", although the shine was taken off when a car chase/accident sent me into a panic after the slightly traumatic events witnessed in the summer vacation. [I'm not going into detail about that anywhere. I'll just say it was scary to see, and "road users on small vehicles, use your goddamn crash helmet and pads".]

Today's food is fish. Just fish. We decided to branch out and buy a fillet of what we thought was mackerel. I like mackerel. I don't think it was mackerel. There were a lot of bones...even on the outside?

But if you can get something a little bit more similar to mackerel, I just heated a pan with some oil in it, threw in some chopped onions and garlic, maybe a tablespoon full of soy, and fried it until they were nice and soft (can't tell about browning because of the soy).

Then I put the chunks of fish in, salted on both sides, skin side up. Not too hot, because I don't want things to stick and burn, but not too cool because I need this to cook quickly, haha.

Fish cooks quickly anyway, which is why it's good, so after a minute or so, if the colour of the meat has changed a bit fairly deep into the middle, I flipped it and turned up the heat to crisp the skin. Overall, I was cooking for about 25 mins, and the fish was in there for all of 10-15.

We just served it up with rice because, again, we're lazy ;p

Not many photos bc there wasn't much way I could make a pile of pan fried fish in a ricebowl look good. And nobody wants to see raw fish with bones everywhere. I've got a few more posts from vacation to do, so I'll get on that!

Culture Class | Starting Something New

To my shame, I'm actually quite a culturally uneducated person, in terms of music and movies. When I reached the age where most kids start exploring music, old films, and interesting TV shows, I discovered anime, J-pop, and asian dramas. And I stayed there.

For a long time.

As a general rule of thumb, if you have to ask "have you seen/heard...[insert very popular thing here]?" my answer will most likely be no.

Until about a year or so ago, I hadn't seen the original Star Wars trilogy, I've not seen Jurassic Park (that I can actually remember), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Sound of Music, Singing in the Rain, When Harry Met Sally, any Batman films (new or old), and other than the bits of Casino Royale we had to watch at A-Level...I've never seen a James Bond film.

So, with all the spare time we have in the evenings, Nick and I have decided to start a sort of "culture swap", largely inspired by Polly Adams' Culture Coach project, where every week a classic book, film, and album are doled out in a sort of book club for people who've been living under a cultural rock for their formative years.

This week, we watched When Harry Met Sally (so good), and I finally watched Dark Night Rises (REALLY good), two in one, aw yiss. I also listened to Bloc Party for the first time ever, and am very much sold on them.

"Oh! They sound kind of like Two Door Cinema Club. I like it!"
"No, Two Door sound like THEM. But without any of the conviction."
"Ah. Yes."

The Korvia Summer BBQ!

Woo, it's been a while! In fairness, this is the longest-running and most consistent blog I think I've ever had (and, being a child of the internet, I've had a LOT of blogs...) so I'm not going to lie, I'm quite proud. It probably helps that my life is a lot more interesting now. Let's face it, "I went to a palace" is much better than "I slept for 13 hours then went on Tumblr" ;)

ANYWAY. Quite a few weeks ago now, Nick and I went to the Korvia BBQ. For the uninformed, Korvia is the recruitment agency we used to get our jobs in Korea. It's a great agency, with kind and caring staff and I don't think I'll ever be able to stop singing their praises. 

One of the many great things they do for their recruits is they hold a party or barbecue when the weather is good, to give teachers old and new a chance to mingle and meet some fellow English speakers. It's really nice when you're far away from home with very little in the way of home comforts. I'm quite lucky, because every day I come home to my own little slice of England, but for many people, especially those in more rural areas, I can imagine the homesickness can hit hard.

So, after doing some shopping in the morning (we wanted to buy a "thank you and happy birthday!" present for our lovely recruiter, Daisy) we hopped onto the subway and headed off for Yatap. Annoyingly, we had to take quite a convoluted route there, which meant that we ended up taking the same amount of time as some people that came from much, much further away! However, the subway here is very comfortable so I'm not complaining too much.

When we arrived in the right area, we found some helpful posters dotted around, and slowly the sound of very non-Korean voices drifted over. Yaaay~

Pictured above: the aforementioned sign, my plate piled high with lovely lovely food, and the obligatory photo of Nick eating and wishing I was doing something other than taking terrible photos.

Seoul Food | 닭갈비 Dalkgalbi

Sort of.

Dakgalbi is one of these great, hearty, all-in-one dishes. I discovered it via teaching my 4th grade classes, as one of the lessons on past tense involves the phrase "I ate dakgalbi". Every time it was mentioned, there was inevitably a chorus of "oohs" and "aahs" and "AAH DAKGALBI!!"

High praise indeed.

After some research, I found it's pretty much kids/student/peasant/drunkard food. Easy to make, easy to eat, and most importantly: cheap.

It's marinated chicken with cabbage, carrot, garlic, topokki, onion, and possibly sweet potato, cooked in a sweet and spicy sauce. You can eat it straight out of the pan, and if you're super hungry, you can then chuck in a load of rice and make spicy stir fried rice with the leftover sauce and bits of veg. Topokki (pictured below) is an interesting food that I've had a few times in school, it's basically a little rice cake sausage. Kind of like a VERY thick noodle, so if you've had udon before, it's like that in texture, but maybe 2-3x thicker. It sucks up all the flavour of whatever you put it in, similar to tofu but in a much more appetising way (for me, anyway).

But yes, it sounded incredible and I had to have some.

So here it is.

The "sort of" comes in the form of "we don't buy chicken very often because I hate deboning, breasts are expensive, and pork/beef is so much tastier". So this is a beef tuna* variant. But considering I followed a dakgalbi recipe exclusively up until the point where it said chicken, I won't bother renaming it.

I think this would be great in autumn or winter with a small group of friends, and I can also see why it's so popular as a snack when out drinking.

*we actually ate this two days in a row. Mainly because it was great, but also because I forgot to take a photo of the beef, so needed to recreate it for blogging purposes. Alas, we'd used the last of the beef. Tuna it is then. Not as good as chicken or beef in this situation, but it was still pretty good.

Seoul Food | 비빔밥 Bibimbap

I think this was the first Korean dish I ever ate, courtesy of our "research" undertaken at Bibigo in Soho before coming to Incheon.

It's great, healthy (-ish. You can never tell with the Salt Queen) and makes a little bit of meat stretch a long way.

Anyway, Nick brought home a little book about Korean cuisine in our first week, and there are a few recipes in the back. We use this one a lot, because it's fairly quick and easy, as well as tasty. My presentation is by no means as wonderful as the traditional Korean style, but I hope it still looks fairly appetising. Apparently the toppings are from old Buddhist traditions, with each bit of food representing a different colour, which is really lovely and actually a pretty smart way of getting a balanced meal.

The recipe calls for burdock root and bracken as a topping. I have no idea what these are or what they look like, nor do I know the Korean names for them, so alas I have struggled to buy them. So my bibimbap is generally made with carrot, zucchini, onion of some form, and a separated egg or two, fried up and sliced.

It's by no means authentic, but it's tasty, so maybe try it sometime~

Wookie Cookies

Again, no internet other than school, so uploading photos for blogs is kind of difficult! Here's a retroactive post using old photos and stuff I dug up for original use on a different blog.

Here's the worst thing about our officetel:

We don't have an oven.

We've got a 2-ring hob, a microwave, rice/slow cooker, toaster oven, and even a blender. But we don't have an oven.
That means no baking. Sob.

So, browsing my photos I accidentally came across a little photo project that Nick and I did a couple of months ago that never actually made it onto the internet. I like it a little too much, so in memory of my beloved hobby I thought I'd put them here while I try and think of some recipes that don't require an oven.

Chocolate(-ish) Ready Brek Cookies
(Recipe modified from http://mummyslittlestars.com/secret-ready-brek-cookies/)

• 5oz butter
• 5oz caster sugar
• 1 egg yolk
• 4oz Ready Brek
• 3oz self raising flour
• 2oz cocoa powder
• ½ tsp baking powder

1. Cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy