Today is my blogging off day. I went outside to take some pictures of the snow we had last night.
All the snow was taken by greedy kids from this apartment complex, not leaving us any good clean snow, they enjoyed their playing. (meany brutes)
(Snow on a golf course, obviously no one managed to get it and have fun)
(Some trees are still green)
It’s been a very long time since I last had samgyeopsal. I think Koreans have to eat samgyeopsal on a regular basis – Otherwise people go crazy like me.
According to a recent Korean news paper, Koreans consumed about 17 kg of pork per person in 2005, compared to beef – 6.6 kg and chicken – 7.4 kg, and more than 50 % of the pork was the samgyeopsal. To meet this consumption, Korea has imported massive amounts of samgyeopsal from 14 countries, the amount was about 85,000t for the last 11 months. Why are Koreans so crazy for samgyeopsal?
Well, for me, it is delicious. That is all I can say. 
I especially like it when the meat is cooked in a golden crispy way.
The reason I haven’t had it for a long time was, simply, I didn’t have a grill plate for it. I wasn’t going to buy it until I moved out from this house, because I didn’t want to increase our load, but my tolerance had nearly reached the limit. I decided to buy a grill pan finally, whether it will be a burden or not. (I will tell you about the grill plate in the next post.)
This is the samgyeopsal we ate. (1.4 kg served 4 people – about US $22, I know it is a lot to eat, but we haven’t had this for nearly for 8 months, we were like some kind of hungry wolves. 
)
It was s~o good, the meat was melting in my mouth. I totally loved having baked Kimchi with the meat. It is another level of delight.
Enjoying Samgyeopsal dos and don’t
Do
Don’t
I couldn’t keeping taking pictures after smelling it (and who would?), so I can’t give you a visual image of “dos and don’t”, yet I am going to hold another party soon, then I can show you more of the side dishes I made.
Related Posts
Pork Belly BBQ (Samgyeopsal Gui)
Steamed Pork Wrapped in Leaves (Bossam in Korean)
Steamed Pork Ribs (Dwaeji Galbi Jjim in Korean) – Natural Sauce Version
About a month ago, at a regular gathering with the other foreigners in this area, we went to a Chinese restaurant. We usually order sweet and sour pork as a main meal to share and individuals order small meals like fried rice or Jajangmyun. Then two of the adventurous Canadian couple suggested we have something different than sweet and sour pork, and they suggested we have deep fried chicken in garlic sauce instead. They said it was really delicious. Michael and I didn’t mind, but others were a bit iffy.
The dish was served and it looked so glorious. I hadn’t had it for a long time, so I almost forgot what it tasted like. The chicken had golden fried skin, very crispy texture, and slightly sweet – sour and spicy – garlicky taste. Everyone totally loved it, except one person.
Then a couple of days ago, I really craved that dish and I tried to make it.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have the right amount of starch powder, so I had to change the method a little bit. Sadly it turned out that it wasn’t as crispy as what I had at the Chinese restaurant, but it was still delicious in a sour, garlicky, morish way. I still have some ingredients left over and bought a new pack of starch powder, so I am going to make one more dish, hopefully improved, this week sometime.
Ingredients for 2 people (If you are having other small meals as well, then you can share between 3 people)
(Expected prep time – 15 minutes, Cooking time – 30 minutes ; You can reduce the time if you have a big frying machine and bigger kitchen)
Meat and extras
Marinade Chicken (mix these together in a bowl)
Batter
Garlic sauce (mix these together in a bowl)
Prep
Cooking (you will need two woks)
I hope you like it, we certainly did!
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When I was making Kimchi Bokkumbap for lunch, my sister was helping me out. I said to her to cut neatly and put the ingredients neatly on a plate, because I need to take some pictures to post for the blog, and my sister was surprised because I haven’t posted recipes for Kimchi bokkumbap yet. I sort of did here, but it is more complicated because it has some extra ingredients and didn’t taste as good as this one, if I remember the taste right. (It was a very early post, so my cooking wasn’t as good as nowadays.)
This recipe is really simple and quick to make, you can also appreciate the Kimchi taste more (this implies that it has a stong Kimchi taste). It works really well with bacon and enoki mushrooms too. It was the best Kimchi bokkumbap I ever had. 
Ingredients for 3 big eaters or 4 medium eaters
(Prep time – 5 minutes, Cooking time – 5 minutes )
Prep
Cooking
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Korea has two national holidays about New years day. One is called Shin jung (solar New years day) and the other one is called Gu jung (lunar New years day – Chinese New years day) Apparently more than 90% of people celebrate on lunar New years day and less than 10% of people celebrate on solar New years day.
Ddeok Guk is the core meal of New Years day in Korea, but Koreans eat it on normal days as well. It means purity (from its white color), maturity (there is a saying that if you have Ddeok guk on New years day, you get one year older, its further meaning is I wish you become mature), wishing long life (rice cakes used for ddeok guk are very long) and rich (rice cakes’ shape looks like currency in the old days). Of course as a kid I wanted to grow up faster, so I ate too much Ddeok Guk and got sick instead.
The Ddeok guk I made was enough for one meal without any rice. I added some instant dumplings, some Koreans prefer eating rice cake soup in this way and they use handmade dumplings. My recipe below is a simple version, the traditional version includes pheasant meat, but now it is rare, people use beef instead. Yet I didn’t even add beef here.
Ingredients for 4 people
Main
Broth
Vegetables
Toppings
Prep
Cooking
Note
Rice cakes for ddeok guk are called garaeddeok and they are the same rice cake for ddeokbokki (stir fried rice cake with gochujang) but just a bit thicker. You slice them diagonally then it looks like what I used. If you bought a lot of garaeddeok, you can keep them in the freezer.
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What Rice Cake, for Cooking, Looks Like
Fried Honey Cake (Yakgwa in Korean) (New years day traditional snack)