Tag Archives: Recipe

Gearing up for the New Year!

We are on the heels of 2015 and I wonder, what does this coming year have in store for us? For all my readers and loved ones out there, I hope only the best!

Resolutions, what are you resolving?   What is in your life? Have you chosen to take a better look at your financial decisions? Diet and exercise? Be less crazy? Identify your crazy and stop it? Whatever you’ve resolved to do, go head with your bad self!

Here’s a healthy way to start the year!

Hwe Dup Bap

Dup baps are awesome, take a bowl of steamy rice and “dup puh” – cover it with good things.  Koreans do it with various meats: grilled chicken, beef, cuttlefish and in our case raw fish.

The premise is simple, take a lot of veggies and a little sashimi grade fish, throw it on top of rice and cover it with hot sauce, mix and eat.

This is probably one of my favorite dishes.

RECIPE (for 2-3 servings)
1/2 cup Carrot, thinly sliced
4-breakfast raddish, thinly sliced
½ cup Red Cabbage, thinly sliced
1 cup Red Leaf Lettuce (or romaine, green leaf, anything relatively mild)
6 Perilla leaf, thinly sliced
¼ Cucumber, gutted and thinly sliced
½ Avocado, diced
|½ cup Japanese seaweed salad  (wakame salad)
2-3 oz assorted sashimi grade fish, cut into small cubes

The prep work is a little time consuming, a lot of chopping.  I usually chop more veggies than I need, I can usually find a way to use the rest of them, for instance, I’m going to blend the rest of them in my morning smoothie.

The trick to really crunchy veggies is soaking them in cold water for at least 20 minutes.  I promise it’s worth it.

Assembly is the easy part, remember ladies and gents we eat with our eyes, so make it pretty!  A sushi chef once told me that 3D is the way to be, so plot a  scoop of rice on the bottom of a deep bowl, arrange the veggies, put the fish in the center of the bowl and leave the sauce for the side.

Whoops, the sauce!
Mix all the following ingredients together for the sauce
¼ cup  gochujang (hot pepper paste)
½ cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 teaspoon lemon zest
3 tablespoons sesame seed oil (sounds like a lot but it’s a lot of sauce)
1 tablespoon white vinegar
1 teaspoon toasted sesame seeds

Random thought, radishes are beautiful!

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Throwback Tuesday – Meatloaf

I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that!
Meatloaf, what was that? What didn’t you want to do?

My best friend growing up was this Dutch girl who lived across the way.  Her mom made the best meatloaf.  I didn’t even know the Dutch ate meatloaf, but it was delicious.  First of all, it was laced with bacon and then she basted the bacon with ketchup, as it baked the sugar in the ketchup would start to caramelize and the bacon would crisp up.  The final result was this juicy, bacony, delicious cut of meatloaf.

The cover of this month’s Fine Cooking Magazine is meatloaf.  The article goes into all these variation on meatloaves; they encourage the home chef to experiment with various aromatic, meats, cheeses and toppings.

Meatloaf is pretty easy, you’re going to sauté some veggies, soak a bunch of stale bread in milk, mix everything together, make it pretty and bake it off.

Here’s the loaf I made for my sister, she likes her food good and straightforward.

STEP ONE: Sauté the vegetables. Fry them up till they are just translucent, you don’t want a bunch of color; just get the vegetables nervous and sweaty.  Pull them off to the side to cool while you do the next step.

2 Tablespoon olive oil
1 medium onion (diced)
2 large cloves of garlic (minced)
½ cup diced carrot
½ cup diced celery
1 jalapeno pepper diced
Salt and Pepper

STEP TWO: The bread. Get about ½ of a stale loaf of bread and cut it into 2’’ pieces.  Soak the bread in a shallow dish; it should be wet but not falling apart (5-10 mins)

About 2.5 cups 2’’ pieces of stale bread
1 cup whole milk

STEP THREE: Mix!  Combine all the ingredients together. Get messy!

The Veggies (step one)
The Bread (step two)
¾ cup pilsner beer
2lb ground beef
2 large eggs
1 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
Salt and pepper

Step Four: Mold the loaf it should be about 2 inches tall and rectangular. on a baking sheet no fancy meatloaf pan needed.  Then top with 10 strips of bacon! Baste with Ketchup

Step Five: Bake the baby! 375F for around 55 minutes get a thermometer (160F).

Throwback Tuesdays – Instant v. Slow

I love instant noodles of all kinds….

Instant mac and cheese, we don’t really eat it because we think it’s delicious, it’s easy and for the time you invest it’s good! I’ll do it from time to time but we eat these things more out of convenience than taste. The only exception I can think of is haet ban. The Korean instant rice things, I don’t know what they do to that rice but it’s so good (I digress).

Good foods often take a lot more time than their instant counterparts. Just like people. Relationships that are reinforced with time and energy are often better than “instant” ones. I have a lot of “instant” friends, we could get a beer, we could have dinner, go dancing, but I wouldn’t share my life with them. The relationships that go deep are ones gilded with lots of time, energy and are often costly. They are and should be my favorites.

To prove the point here is my Mac and cheese recipe. It’s expensive, it takes a long time to make and there is so much fat that it’ll stick with you for a while.

1 stick of butter (doesn’t matter salted or unsalted…)
1 pint of heavy whipping cream
1/2 lb. of cheddar cheese (sharp) Shredded
8 oz. of Velveeta spread
2.5 tablespoon flour
¼ teaspoon dry mustard powder
salt & pepper

noodles.. Whatever kind you want, try to get stuff with lots of curls and maybe ridges on the outside… get more sauce

1. On low heat melt all the butter then sprinkle in flour and cook for a minute or so
2. Stir in cream (stir like crazy!), make sure you don’t get any lumps
3. Get the Velveeta, melted in
4 Get the cheese melted, save 25% of the cheese
5. Sprinkle in mustard. Salt and pepper to taste (make it a little saltier than you want it since you aren’t going to season your noodles).
6. While making the sauce cook the pasta.  Cook it till it’s just a little undercooked…
7. Stir in pasta
8. Transfer to baking dish.
9. Top off with the remaining cheese
10. Place in oven (375F) till it’s golden (~30 minutes)

VOILA!
Tips:
Don’t microwave leftovers! This is a béchamel-type sauce, if you microwave it the sauce will separate into oil and milk solids… so heat it back up in the oven. This doesn’t happen with the stuff from a box because a really smart food scientist did their magic…  Before placing in the oven the mac and cheese should look runny, if it isn’t add more cream, it needs to be runny or the final product will be too dry.

You can switch out for different types of milk. Just realize that the less fat the milk has the thinner the cheese sauce. So do one of two things to keep the consistency of the sauce, back off on the total amount of milk you use or make more of the butter/flour (which is called a roux) combo.

Oh yea, and don’t cook the roux too much, melt the butter slow on a low heat and cook the flour for a while, but don’t let it get brown. If it’s not cooked enough you’ll get a gross raw flour taste but if it gets to brown you’ll get some weird brown notes that aren’t indicative of a good mac and cheese.

A New Begining

I have been postponing the first entry for this blog because I thought it would need to be profound or particularly thought provoking.
Something that would stand out… but it’s been 2 months and I got nothing that stands out. So I’ll just begin, softly and see how it all pans out.

The prime mover for this blog is food. By day,  I’m food scientist and by evening time I’d like to think I transform into a culinary maverick!  Unless you are Andy Ricker (owner of Pok Pok here in NYC), you tend to cook what you know.  Seeing as I’m Korean American, I’ll be cooking a lot of Korean with dabbles in other types of cuisines.  I’d say I’m passionate about food… passion makes me think of fire and what’s more fire-y than a Thai Curry (see the Pok Pok Thai food connection!)?

I love Thai food! What’s not to like about chilies, lime, ginger, sweet, aromatic, and savory combos.  This recipe isn’t super fancy but it is delicious!

Ingredients:
2.5 lbs of boneless skinless chicken breast (cut into 1.5” chunks)
1 medium onion
1 red bell pepper
1 green bell pepper
1 yellow bell pepper
1.5 cup of baby portobello mushrooms
1 cup snow peas (trimmed)
1 can of coconut cream (16 oz)
1 cup red curry paste (it’s a lot, but be generous it’s worth it!)
1 teaspoon fish sauce
1 tablespoon brown sugar (or the legit kind from the Thai market)
3 Keiffer lime leaves
3 Thai bird chillies
Thai basil, a big handful

Woah, I guess that’s a lot of ingredients, it didn’t seem like it when I was making it…
So here is what you do, I’m going to give my recipes in the order I do it in my kitchen, the nerdy scientist in me loves efficiency so I like making every minute in the kitchen count.

Put the chicken cubes in with the onion that you have cut into long strips, cover the chicken and onions with water. Boil the chicken and onions over medium heat while you’re cutting the rest of the veggies. Cut all the veggies nice and long and don’t cut them too thin, you want to make sure that they won’t disappear in the curry as it cooks down. I only halved the mushrooms because they were on the small side.

At this point, your chicken should be cooked through (unless you have superhuman knife skills, in which case, you should grab a beer and chill for a moment… ), add in your coconut cream to get every drop I rinsed out the can with water and poured that water into the pot. Now you have the chicken, onions, initial water, coconut cream, and another can full of water in the pot. Now add the curry paste, fish sauce, lime leaves, and sugar. Let all of that come to a boil on med/high heat. Now add in all the veggies and chilies. I love it when the veggies still have a little crunch so I just let them warm through and then serve over rice.

In the famous words of the original Duck Commander, Phil, “this makes me happy happy.. happy happy happy.. ” enjoy!

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