korean food ive made

Despite me being Taiwanese, I have to confess that I don't find myself cooking it a lot. It can be simple — stirfry this, boil that, etc. But the things that I do like to eat tend to be fairly difficult. And I have the exclusive privilege of living in an apartment without a range hood.

And thus, the stewy and soupy nature of Korean food becomes my go-to cuisine.

My favorite one is tofu soup: high in protein (tofu + meat + seafood mix + egg) and fairly affordable (tofu soup packet + tofu from hmart is like $4.99). But my senior engineer (who works me very hard) sent me an easy recipe for the paste:

if u ever wanna make soondubu at homeMince garlicMine green onionMix thatt with gochugaru and soy sauceDo a crap load of it
you should get a red paste

lmao das it? was my exact response to this. I tried it tonight and it does actually work pretty well! I think I should've held on the soy sauce a bit but overall, a success — I approve of this one (because you know i am SO qualified to talk about Korean food).

Oh yes — I generally add hot pot meat, silken tofu, seafood mix and an egg in there!

I've also made a fair amount of banchan. Kimchi is a little too elaborate for me, so I stick to stuff like the chicken-mu radish (for which I use Maangchi's recipe). There's also this account on Instagram called @tressuni that showcases a banchan recipe of the week!

Other easy meals include bibimguksu, which is like bibimbap but is really more of a noodle salad. I first saw this at TJ's where they were trying to sell this to me for $4.99. I bought a bowl and really figured I could do better.

I did not do much better. But god damn is it cheaper than $5! What I do is basically I cut up some salad veggies (lettuce, carrot, etc) then boil some soba noodles and toss that into a bowl. For the red bibmbap sauce, I use this recipe.

And I did try making galbi jjim once. It turned out ... ok. Esteemed subscribers Jennifer Wang and Emily Ding thought it was ok. I did find the grating of pears for use as a sweetener to be very interesting!

Maybe I should be trying to make more Chinese food. But I just made a shit ton of soondubu paste — so catch me drinkin some more soup B).