Chicken in gochujang sauce with rice paper or What I did with Wandering Chopsticks' rice paper

A few months ago I won a prize in a draw and accordingly received two packets of banh trang (rice paper) from Wandering Chopsticks.
The first packet (tapioca rice paper) were gone within a week so I didn't have a chance to take any photos...
OK I admit that's a lie. Truth is, I haven't rolled rice paper for a wee while so my expertise has gone downhill. My practice rolls were either so fat that the fillings burst out half way or too thin that there is virtually no fillings at all. Besides, the hubby kept laughing at my attempt of making a decent roll to be photographed so I thought I'd rather wait until I make a photograph-able decent-ish roll.

This lunch time, whilst browsing for recipes, an idea came to my mind. I love Korean food and obviously Vietnamese food, why not combine the two and make a fusion.

So this is what I came up with.

Recipe for dakgalbi (chicken in gochujang sauce) was inspired by Sue from My Korean Kitchen's dakgalbi


Sue's recipe includes sesame leaves and rice cake, which can only be found in Korean shop so I came up with my own adapted version of dakgalbi

Sauce:
Gochujang - 2tbsp
Water - 2tbsp
Sugar - 1/2 tbsp
Chopped Garlic - 1 clove
Honey - 1tbsp
Soy sauce - 1tsp

Mix all ingredients together and leave aside

Ingredients (for 1)
Chicken breast - 1, sliced into thin strips
Chinese cooking wine - 1tbsp
Assorted veg - anything you fancy really, I use 1 courgette, 1 stick of celery, 1 carrot, all chopped into thin strips
Lettuce and mixed herbs (I use mint and coriander from the garden)

Method:
Marinate chicken in cooking wine, a pinch of salt and pepper and set aside for 15 minutes
Mix sauce with chicken.
Turn heat on medium high, pour 1tbsp olive oil into a pan, pour chicken and sauce in the pan, stir and put lid back on for 5 mins
Stir again after 5 minutes to make sure chicken pieces are not stuck to the bottom of the pan and put lid back on for another 5 mins.
Mix veg in the pan with a splash of water and stir fry until done (should take a couple more minutes max.)

Serve with hot rice or you can make it into cigar-shaped rolls like I do (a layer of lettuce and mixed herbs then chicken on top, roll it and dip in the sauce from the pan)

Maybe it's a case of 'grass is greener on the other side', I don't know, I still think W.C's banh trang taste much better than the ones I bought.
So thank you for your generosity ($11 postage doesn't go to waste I did promise you). Now that I can make a decent roll I shall attempt at some other rice paper dishes in the near future.
For now...good night and enjoy!

Kimchi...at last

For the last year or so I have been desperately searching for a fool-proof kimchi making recipe. The first recipe I tried was from the first link that came up on Google search. There was no mention of the use of gochujang and also, it asked for kimchi sauce, which I honestly didn't really trust. Anyway, I tried and the result was horrendous, so bad that I nearly put the hubby off kimchi for life. He was so put off by my home-made kimchi that he has been buying kimchi for me from my favourite Korean store in town (the one that Park Ji Sung frequently visits :).
To cut the story short, last week I decided to try Wandering chopsticks' napa kimchi. I halved most of the ingredients since I was worried that it was going to be chucked away if it turns out to be another rotten batch (W.C it was my skills that I doubted, not your recipe). I did everything as instructed in the recipe and I swore to myself that I will give up making kimchi if it didn't work.
God must have felt sorry for the novice cook this time. The kimchi turns out to be more than beautiful. The juice is so yummy I can drink it straight. It is so nice that I have even managed to turn the hubby into a kimchi junkie (yipee).
Since I didn't change anything in the recipe, people who are interested can visit the link directly.
Special thanks to W.C :D

Dakdoritang - tried and tested

It is supposed to look like this:
Instead mine looks like this:
(steaming hot, aye?)

As some of you may know, I am a huge fan of Korean food. When I came across this incredibly-easy-to-follow recipe, thanks to a blogger called paintroller, I decided to make dakdoritang for my tea last night.

The only differences are:-

I replaced potatoes with sweet potatoes since I was never keen on white potatoes

I also added shiitake mushroom as I am a mushroom addict

There were no spring onions in the house so I had to make do without it.

I served it with rice and beansprout salad (someone please remind me of the Korean name) and spinach (another type of banchan which name has escaped me)

The end result, taste-wise, was quite yummy. Look-wise, it’s not as pretty as it should have looked. However, since I am a sole diner, I wasn’t too bothered about the aesthetic aspect of the dish.

So, without much further ado, please find the much praised recipe below. You can find the proper post (with step by step photo instructions) on paintroller blog.

Note to self: Chinese soy sauce (even the light soy sauce) is naturally more salty than the Korean soy sauce. Go easy on it.

“Ingredients (for 4)

2 chickens
soy sauce
a lot of garlic
fresh ginger
carrots
potatoes
onions
sugar
black pepper
gochujang (red pepper paste)

1. Get two chickens at the market. Tell the chicken man that you're making dakdoritang and he'll cut it up approriately. Outside Korea I recommend buying chicken thighs, bone in and skin on, because that's where the flavor is.

2. Put the chicken in a pot full of water and bring it almost to a boil. Some schmaltz will appear on the top of the water.

3. Discard the water.

4. Your chicken should now look like this.

5. Add some soy sauce.

6. More soy sauce.

7. Add even more soy sauce. I reckon she poured in about 1/2 of a cup of soy sauce. At this point it's the only liquid in the pot so the chicken soaks it up.

8. Add red pepper powder. You'll notice that in the picture my mother-in-law is in fact adding red pepper paste. That is because she was not happy with the quality of the two kinds of red pepper paste currently in the house. I suggest that if you are making this outside Korea this wil cut down on expenses, in that you too can use red pepper paste twice instead of buying paste and powder. A heaping wooden spoonful will do. Incidentally, my mother-in-law has thrown her weight behind Haechandle brand gochujang (red pepper paste).

9. Add water. My mother-in-law said she added extra water because I like the sauce, but you can leave it up to taste, adding between 1/2 cup and a cup.

10. Add potatoes, cut roughly as for stew.

11. Add black pepper to taste.

11. Add sugar. I would guess about four tablespoons.

12. This much.

13. Stir and taste.

14. This is where you would normally add the red pepper paste. Again, Haechandle, and about a heaping wooden spoonful.

15. Chop and smash about 8 cloves of garlic.

16. Chop and smash one chunk of fresh peeled ginger. Ginger is the Korean's go-to odor eliminator, and I don't know if dakdoritang usually contains it, but, in an interesting side note, my mother-in-law hates chicken. She never ever eats it, since she was a child and she witnessed a particularly gruesome chicken beheading.

17. Add the garlic and ginger. By now the stew should look like this.

18. Add onions, cut large like the potatoes.

19. Add green onions, again cut roughly into one inch pieces.

20. I reminded my mother-in-law at the last minute that I like carrots, so she added half a carrot to appease me.

20. Cover and let it cook for about 10 minutes and it's good to go."

Enjoy!

My own soon dubu - Spicy Korean tofu soup

I finally got myself a tub of gochujang. The recipe for this spicy Korean tofu stew/soup is from The Budding Cook and the only change I made was that I used shittake mushrooms instead of enoki mushrooms (due to shittake mushrooms being twice as cheap as the other one).
So I have just added another recipe onto my quick meal recipes collection.Super easy to make and guarantee to be mouth-watering :D
Enjoy

Ingredients:
1 tablespoon sesame oil
A couple tablespoons of garlic
2 tablespoons Hot Pepper Paste (Gochujang)
2 tablespoons Hot Pepper Powder
1 bunch of enoki mushrooms
1 egg
about 7 oz of beef, chicken or veggie stock
1 package of tofu

Pour about 1 tablespoon of sesame oil into pot. Add garlic and sautee. Then drain the tofu and place into pot w/ 2 heaping tablespoons of hot pepper paste. Mix tofu up breaking it into bits and mixing w/ hot pepper paste. Add just enough beef stock to cover the tofu. Add 2 tablespoons of hot pepper powder for a more spicy flavor. Allow mixture to boil. Wash enoki mushrooms and cut off the ends. Add enoki mushrooms just at the end. Make sure to cover them in the stew. Then just before serving crack a egg into the mix. Serve over white rice.
(From The Budding Cook- thanks)

I think I'm turing Korean

Foods over the weekend.
1. Tried and tested GALBI from Wandering Chopsticks
Guaranteed to be soft, slightly sweet and juicy. Once you've tried it, I'm sure you'll get addicted to it :D Thanks Wandering Chopsticks for the recipe :D
2. HODDEOK from My Korean Kitchen

These Korean pancakes are lovely treats and the brown sugar, cinnamon and crushed walnuts go together beautifully. Surely will do it again in the near future.
Recipes will be posted tomorrow. Have a good day.

My first (and probably last) attempt to do kimbap

Now if someone out there is kind enough, I'd like to know what is the main difference between sushi and kimbap? I got this recipe off My Korean Kitchen and altered it a bit so that I didn't have to buy anything except for seaweed wraps. The seaweed wraps were on offer for 87p so I couldn't resist anyway :D.
I'd always thought that sushi/kimbap is pretty bland and I thought maybe if I tried to make it at home it would somehow taste better than the store-bought version. I was right in a way. The kimbap I made definitely had a fresher taste than the ones I used to buy from the supermarket. The only thing is, it is still tasteless. It's not like I don't like Korean food because I couldn't live without kimchi and gochujang. I guess I'm more into the hot and spicy side of Korean food.
Mmmm, even though I didn't like it in the end, at least I tried making it once.

First-time donburi

Apparently donburi is a bowl of rice served with one or various toppings. Inspired by Cooking Cute, I decided to make my own donburi today. I didn't expect much but it came out quite nicely. The only thing is that I had a heap of dishes to wash afterwards.
The picture is from Cooking Cute website as my camera was playing up and I couldn't take a picture (:D honest, It's not because my dish is c**p). As I didn't have ground beef (or more precisely, I have to save the ground beef for the hubby's tea tonight) ;I replaced it with dried tofu sheet, which is similar in the way that it's another source of protein. The crispy texture of mange tout goes perfectly well with the soft scrambled egg and saute'd tofu. I also added sliced shitake mushrooms sauted in oyster sauce and soy sauce as I absolutely adore shitake mushrooms. After all, I topped it with a bit of gochujang (another confession, I am also addicted to gochujang) and mix everything together (steamed mange tout, shitake mushroom, scrambled egg and sauted tofu and of course, steaming hot rice.).
Hang on a minute, it tastes too similar to bibimbap. Now I'm confused, what is the difference between bibimbap and donburi then? Maybe I altered the recipe too much it has turned from Japanese food to Korean food with a Chinese twist. Or maybe I'm a novice cook after all and I can't tell the difference between Korean and Japanese food. Oh well, whatever, as long as it tastes nice, it's worth my effort.

Korean fusion food - or is it just a crazy idea from the novice cook?

Teczscape's udon stir-fry gave the novice cook an inspiration to try stir-frying udon for the first time. Thing is, the novice cook also wants to play with her food and in the true style of Ready Steady Cook, the novice cook was determined to make a mouth-watering dinner from random ingredients found in the novice cook's fridge, which include:
a packet of udon noodles, shitake mushrooms, pak choi, coriander, asparagus, chillies and prawns
The novice cook came up with the idea of marinating prawns in a soy sauce + oyster sauce + salt + pepper, then stir-fry the prawns for 3 mins, then set aside. All the other ingredients were stir-fried together, in the order of shitake mushroom-asparagus-pak choi- coriander then the cooked udon noodles were mixed in and the whole thing was seasoned liberally with sweet soy sauce + fish sauce + 1tsp oyster sauce.
Another 30 seconds and voila, the end-result actually tasted much better than what the novice cook had expected.
Mission accomplished. Who says playing with your food is not fun...

Discovery of the year

Picture is illustrative only
I am totally addicted to dolsot bibimbap. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that making bibimbap at home is not as difficult as I'd thought. The first time I tried Korean food was a few years back and for some reasons I didn't have a very good impression of their cuisine. At the time I thought Korean food is just a passing craze popularised by Korean dramas. Kimchi was the only Korean dish that I loved then.
The second time I tried Korean food was when some Hong Kong friends organised a farewell party at a Korean cafe in Manchester and I had the chance to try cold buckwheat noodles then and I had to say it kind of cemented my serious doubt about Korean food. I just didn't understand how can something so tasteless like that is so much loved by many people. In hindsight, I suppose it wasn't a good idea to eat cold noodles in the middle of the winter so that could explain why cold noodles were so tasteless to me.
The third time I tried Korean food was we went on holiday to Hong Kong last year. We had never tried bulgogi before and it was so good that it made me completely change my mind about Korean food.
Needless to say I've been converted since and have also added udon, Ojingeo sundae (Tofu, egg, sesame, chili and vegetable wrapped with 1cm-wide pieces of steamed squid) onto my favourite food list and of course I am very eager to discover more about Korean cuisine.