Kimchi Bibim Guksu (Spicy cold noodles with kimchi)

Tags

bibim guksu, cold noodles, dinner, fast meals, gochujang, kimchi, kimchi bibim guksu, Korean, lunch, mains, Noodles, perilla, quick meals, sesame, sesame oil, shiso, spicy, spicy cold noodles

I’m a big fan of Korean dramas and variety shows (I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before). I blame it on those very shows that I’m getting fatter by the day. They make Korean food look so sooooo appetizing! These are one of the dishes that I saw on the telly sometime back. It sounded and looked good… cold kimchi noodles.

After a bit of research, I decided to try the recipe from Korean Bapsang (website below). Her stuff is what you’d call “daebak” (awesome). Her food photos and recipes seem pretty and easy to follow so I made the noodles a few months ago with the recipe. It was good! Totally would make this again. Cold, sour rounded by some sweetness, and a little spice. And kimchi always makes everything taste better.

http://www.koreanbapsang.com/2011/07/kimchi-bibim-guksu-spicy-cold-noodles.html#.Ug-0fhYqS0s

Speaking about spice, I ordered this dish today at a Korean restaurant. All I can say is that I must have downed a whole jug of iced water after a few bites. I’m a person that would sprinkle chilli flakes liberally all over my food and use chilli padi soy sauce as a favourite condiment so I don’t think my spice tolerance is that low. But I really couldn’t enjoy the noodles, it being so spicy! So if you’re not a fan of spicy food, you can adjust the level of gochujang to suit your preferences (this recipe isn’t that spicy in any case).

Secondly, on my recent trip to Japan, I frequented a korean restaurant in Takashimaya, Tokyo (I really liked it!) and made a discovery. In all my posts on Korean food so far I’ve been referring to shiso/Japanese perilla leaves as the Korean perilla leaf. When I tried the real Korean perilla leaf I was taken aback. I absolutely had no idea that they were so different! As wikipedia clarifies:

“The flavor is distinct from Japanese perilla, and the leaf appearance is different, as well – larger, rounder, flatter, with a less serrated edge, and often a violet coloring on the reverse side.”

Well that explains why the leaf was so large. So now, I’m on a mission to find Korean perilla leaves in Singapore ;p

Ingredients (2 pax); recipe from Korean Bapsang

• 8 – 10 ounces somyeon (somen) noodles
• 1 cup thinly sliced kimchi (fully fermented)
• 1/4 cup juice from kimchi (use a little more soy sauce and vinegar if unavailable)
• 1 tablespoon Korean red chili pepper paste, gochujang (adjust to taste)
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon corn syrup (use honey or more sugar if unavailable)
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 2 tablespoons rice or apple vinegar
• 1 tablespoon sesame oil
• 1 tablespoon sesame seeds
• Optional garnish:
• 4 perilla leaves, kkaennip, thinly sliced (my pictures show the Japanese perilla leaves/shiso leaves)
• (or cucumber or lettuce, thinly sliced)

Cooking instructions

Bring a medium pot of water to a boil while preparing the kimchi sauce.

Thinly slice the kimchi and place it in a medium size bowl. Add the remaining sauce ingredients and mix well.

Add the noodles to the pot of boiling water. Cook the noodles according to the package instructions (3 – 4 minutes).

Prepare a bowl of iced water to dip the noodles into. The recipe in Korean Bapsang calls for cold water, however if it is not cold enough the noodles could get soggy quite easily. So just in case, just use iced water.

Drain the noodles quickly and shock in iced water to stop the cooking. Drain and rinse in cold water again. Repeat until the noodles become cold. Drain well.

Here’s the fun part! Throw your cold noodles into the sauce mixture and toss so that the sauce coats the noodles evenly. Try not to over-handle the noodles with utensils or you could get mashed noodles. Not yummy. Use your wrist to toss the noodles in the bowl and use chopsticks to further mix the noodles.

Dish into a serving bowl and top with (Korean) perilla leaves. I thought Japanese ones worked just as well.

Perfect dish for a hot day!

Advertisement

Kimchi Jiggae

Tags

dinner, egg tofu, healthy, kimchi, Korean, mains, pork, Soup, stew

A spicy sour soup, kimchi jiggae goes well with rice or can be eaten on its own

This is where my love for korean dramas and food ties in well. Every time I watch one of my many korean dramas, there’s always a scene where someone’s eating and having a good time with all that delicious looking korean food. Kimchi fried pancakes, kimchi soup, bulgogi, Korean barbeque and the list is endless. After watching so much of it, I crave the food featured in the shows even if I’ve never tried it.

One of my favourite Korean dishes is Kimchi jiggae, a sort of soup or stew made with kimchi. Kimchi is essentially a fermented vegetable, most commonly made from napfa cabbage, and is loaded with vitamins as well as a healthy bacteria called lactobacilli which helps your digestion system. It has long been known to be a “health food” thus said.

Unfortunately I like the taste of it much more than I like the health benefits so I eat lots of this fermented cabbage. I throw it into kimchi stews and add meat to it and it comes out deliciously spicy and sour with plenty of umami.

Kimchi jiggae ingredients: Onions and garlic, tofu, pork slices, spring onions, enoki mushrooms, kimchi, tomatoes and milk

Ingredients (Serves 3-4 pax)

1. 400g of kimchi
2. 1 packet of pressed tofu or you could substitute this with egg tofu, sliced into manageable pieces
3. 1/2 a large green onion, diced
4. 1 stalk spring onion, chopped
5. 3-4 cloves of garlic, sliced
6. A handful of enoki mushrooms, bottom chopped off and mushrooms cleaned
7. 1 tomato, quartered
8. A packet of your favorite slice of meat, could be that shabu shabu meat or chunks, whichever you prefer just make sure it is room temperature. I use sliced pork meant for shabu shabu.
9. 1/2 cup of full cream milk
10. 5-6 cups of chicken//beef stock or water (I use water, but to get a richer taste you could use stock), enough to cook the ingredients in
11. Chilli padi if you like your stew spicy

Cooking Instructions

1. Heat up a tablespoon of oil in a sauce pan to fry your garlic and onions
2. Once your onions are slightly translucent, add the tomatoes and stir fry
3. Add the kimchi, milk and stock/water to the pan and let this simmer for about 3-5 few minutes.
4. Slowly add your meat to the pot, then your mushrooms. If you opted for a chilli padi then add to the pot here. Let this simmer for 3-5 minutes.
5. Slide your tofu into the mix and let this cook for a couple of minutes more.
6. Scatter spring onions over the top and serve in its pot. If you have a nice stone/earthenware pot you could use that instead to make it all the more pleasing to the eye.
7. Eat with fluffy white rice or translucent rice noodles

You could add some noodles to this to make it a one pot meal or have it as a carb-less meal

Fried Pork on kimchi with rice

Tags

dinner, fried, fusion, Home Cooking, kimchi, pork, rice

 

I love reading up on food, it’s been a bad habit of mine ever since I was a kid. I’d dig out books on food in the library and spend my lunch breaks sitting and reading cook books or food in general. Why? It’s because I’m a glutton. I don’t know what I was in my previous life but I won’t be surprised if I often was hungry or just pure greedy back then.

One of my recent reads include this food manga called Oishinbo. It spans through several volumes and each volume would cover different topics, such as “Raw Fish, Sashimi” , “Vegetables”, “Rice”, “Izakaya” and so on so forth. In one of the volumes, I came across this dish where they fried breaded oysters and put it on top of kimchi and rice. It sounded strange but drool worthy enough. I love kimchi and love fried oysters or anything fried.

The thing that I didn’t really like was that I had to fry something if I were to try out this recipe. I’ve got this thing about using large quantities of oil, spluttering hot oil and stinking up my kitchen as well as my living room while frying. So I rarely deep-fry if I can help it. I only extend enough effort to fry simple things like eggs and vegetables but rarely anything else. So my frying skills are worse than my other cooking skills which are bad enough as it is already.

But the thought of fried meat and kimchi was just too alluring….

 

Ingredients (3-4 pax)

1. 750 gram of fatty meat (pork belly, fat cuts of pork meant for sweet and sour pork etc)
2. Panko Breadcrumbs (enough to coat the fatty meat in)
3. Plain flour (to coat the fatty meat)
4. 2 eggs, beaten
5. 1 tbsp soy sauce
6. A heaping tablespoon per person of Japanese Mayo
7. Kimchi
8. 3 tbsp chopped spring onions
9. Cooking oil

Cooking Instructions

1. Cut the meat into 1 inch chunks and marinate with the soy sauce. Set aside
2. Spread the panko onto a plate so it’s easier to coat the meat later. Do the same with the flour on another plate.
3. Coat each piece of meat with flour and shake off the excess before dunking it in the beaten eggs and lastly rolling it in breadcrumbs.
4. Heat up the oil and place the breaded meat in the pan, making sure that you don’t overcrowd the pan. I suppose you should deep fry it but I couldn’t bring myself to so I pan fried it instead.
5. When the meat turns golden brown on each side, remove from the pan and onto a small wire rack that will hold the meat. This is to drain out the oil. You could also put the fried meat onto some kitchen towel but it will cause the crunchy panko layer to become soggy faster.
6. Ladle rice into the bowls and add however much kimchi you like. Then top with your fried meat, mayo and lastly the spring onions.

Quick lunch of Onion eggs and kimchi

Tags

eggs, healthy, kimchi, lunch, omelette, onion eggs, onions, quick meals, rice

Today was one of those days where I just wanted something easy to prepare, something along the lines of hot food and a savory meal.

All I needed to do was to cook some rice in my trusty rice cooker, fry up some onions and egg and then throw some kimchi into the mix. 

Simple, yet so satisfying.

Nothing complicated as to the ingredients, fry up some sliced onions from about 1/2 a green onion, then add 3 eggs beaten with some salt, white pepper and a couple of drops of sesame oil. Cook to your desired doneness and eat with that deliciously fluffy rice and crunchy sour kimchi.