Cooking…

I’ve decided that I cannot keep having stir-fry chicken with vegetables or ra-myeon or tom-yam noodles or sandwiches for the rest of the 8 months in Brissy. I’ve also decided to take cooking a little more serious and attempt to up my cooking skills. This, I will start from mastering Korean dishes!

So far out of all the Korean dishes, I have made Korean pancakes and Spicy Rice Cakes (with instant sauce) before. After an evening of home-made Korean “feast” with my housemates last week, I honestly still need lots of improvements  for those even though I have cooked them multiple times. Yesterday I made two new attempts at the Spicy rice cakes (떡볶이) and Korean bean paste stew (된장찌개). Instead of using instant sauce, I made  spicy rice cakes from scratch, using hot pepper paste, chilli powder and dried anchovies.

It was a little tad salty, but other than that I thought it was pretty good. Hehe.

Oh I added instant noodles, so it should be called Ra-bokki (라볶이) instead. Ramyeon+ ddukbokki.

For the Korean bean paste stew, I went online to Korean search engine naver.com to look for a simple recipe. Actually I skimmed through several bean paste stew recipe but I used the naver recipe as my base point and started from there. Apparently there are different (but not big in variation) ways to make a stew (찌개) be it bean paste stew or Kimchi stew, etc.

 
Ingredients I used for the stew. (I didn’t use carrot)


Boiling stew, looking good.


Ready to eat. Boiling stew looks better with the spring onions on top… :P

I actually modified the recipe a little since I don’t exactly have all the ingredients needed to make an exact same stew but I want to make one that Koreans usually make. It’s a little difficult to do so since I have to go to the city to get ingredients. Oh wait, a new Korean shop just opened around this area, I should go and check it out. :P

Anyway as I’ve stated in Facebook, the taste of the stew didn’t taste too bad but I definitely need more practise. However, since I don’t eat a lot of Korean bean paste stew at Korean restaurants, I’ve forgotten how they should taste like! Yesterday I was not really sure if it tasted right although the taste itself was okay, but does it have that Korean taste, I’m not so sure. I need to go to a Korean restaurant soon to do “research”. Lol.

Of course, I am not going to restrict myself to just Korean food, it is just my starting point.