Cookin’

My parents rarely made or ate Korean food while I was growing up. Occasionally we would have steak tips on the grill with barbecue sauce from a bottle that said “Korean-style barbecue sauce.” We called this “bulgogi” in our house, and it was a long time before I realized that this was not actually bulgogi. Kimchi was talked about in cautionary tones as if it were hotter than the sun, but was never actually made, purchased, or (heaven forbid!) eaten. We also never had white rice, and so when my friends chipped in to buy me a rice cooker for Christmas during my sophomore year in high school, I was thrilled.

I’ve tried to cook certain Korean dishes over the years with varying degrees of success, and with enough tries (and enough luck) I could usually end up with something that I would eat. But over the years I’ve slowly stopped cooking much of anything, Korean or otherwise, that wasn’t either frozen or from a box. Or both. (Yeah, think Ellio’s pizza.) For Korean food, we have been frequenting our local (and not-so-local) Korean restaurants so often that not only are we becoming restaurant regulars, something I hate being, but our wallets are becoming considerably flatter. So I decided to try cooking Korean food again.

Last weekend we drove half an hour to our nearest decent-sized Korean grocery store. The place was packed, presumably with people shopping for the upcoming Lunar New Year. As soon I walked in I was faced with a row of refrigerators where I immediately started looking for떡 (ttok, or chewy Korean rice cakes), which I had never made before but wanted to try. I didn’t see them, but we did get beef for 불고기 (bulgogi) and 갈비 (kalbi). We got a 10 lb. bag of short-grain rice as we had planned, and a bowl of instant pre-packaged 전복죽 (abalone rice porridge), which was a pure impulse buy. And since I eventually did find the떡 and refrained from buying any 빼빼로 (pepero, or cookie sticks dipped in chocolate), I considered it a successful trip.

Here is what I have tried so far this week:

1. 전복죽: The abalone rice porridge was not really “cooking,” since all you have to do is stick it in the microwave and tear open some little pouches and heat it up. But I had been craving it for some reason and didn’t know how to make it myself.  It was okay, although perhaps a little more watery than I thought it would be. This isn’t the exact brand that I tried, but it looked very similar:

2.떡: I bought the sliced oval kind of rice cakes, not the stick kind, and thought that I would stir fry them with some tofu and vegetables. (Full disclosure: I usually use a bottled stir-fry sauce and frozen vegetables, so this is really only one step closer to actual cooking than microwaved rice porridge.) Since I had never bought rice cakes before, I was surprised to find that they were as hard as wood chips. Given their stiffness I was a little skeptical of cooking them for only 2 seconds in boiling water, but it worked and they became soft almost instantly. Next time I’ll try rinsing them after I drain them and won’t let them sit before throwing them in the stir-fry, so hopefully they won’t stick together as much. Still, very tasty! (And no, I won’t be making the spicy떡볶이 anytime soon — talk about hotter than the sun!)

3. 갈비 찜: This is the big recipe — actual cooking, with no convenience ingredients. I had bought the kalbi thinking I would make the Crock-Pot kalbi-jjim recipe that I saw at Kimchi Mamas, but unfortunately I didn’t start early enough and needed a version that didn’t take as long to cook. Luckily, I found this kalbi-jjim recipe at Muffin Top and decided to give it a whirl for dinner tonight.

It turned out pretty good given that I used the wrong cut of kalbi, or at least I’m pretty sure that I did. My kalbi was pre-cut into slices that were about 1/4″ thick, and so I’m guessing that this is the grilling kind, not the braising kind. I also didn’t realize how much extra sugar I needed to add after replacing the sweet dessert wine with Chardonnay, which was all I had on hand. Thankfully I was able to add sugar partway through the cooking with no detrimental effect. I can’t wait to try it again with the right kind of kalbi, and maybe this time in the slow cooker with a dessert wine!

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My family, or at least my father’s side of the family, immigrated to the U.S. from Sweden and Norway several generations back. But we never ate lutefisk when I was growing up, and if my parents ever saw some I’m sure they would run as far away from it as they would from kimchi. However, we did grow up eating such “safe” Swedish classics as Swedish meatballs, peppakakors (ginger cookies), and Swedish coffee rolls.

And I know that if I’m ever interested in cookin’* up one of those Swedish specialties, my mom will be right there to help me.

*In case anyone is wondering, this particular spelling of “cooking” is a reference to the Korean show Nanta, or Cookin’, and is not at all related to my pronunciation.