Cooking Korean Food

I would say this job has officially started to mess with my mind. I have never really cooked Korean food before besides the processed stuff that would come in packages.

On Thanksgiving night I was looking for a recipe for Army Base stew (Bu Dae Jji Gae -부대찌개), a Korean dish that features hot dogs, Spam, meats, kimchi, noodles and other assorted good things. I then got sucked into Maangchi’s YouTube channel, a 40-something Korean lady in New York City who cooks Korean food. Recipe after recipe after recipe I watched in a trance, drooling despite having just had Thanksgiving dinner mere hours ago.

So last night I decided to make one of my favorite childhood dishes that I would only get when we went to a Korean-style Chinese restaurant: Fried chicken in a sweet and spicy garlic sauce (Kkan Poong Chicken – 깐풍 Chicken.) That involved going to the Korean market and buying ingredients for that and other dishes that I want to cook. The checkout clerk thought it funny that a non-Korean would be buying cellophane noodles, rice syrup, potato starch, fermented soy bean paste and other Korean staples.

Anyhow I made my beloved 깐풍기, and it actually came out pretty well. I would probably add more veggies and sauce and made it spicier, but it ended up tasting pretty good. I’ll make some Japchae 잡채 this weekend.

I’m blaming all of this on working at a Korean company. Yes. It’s their fault.