Korean Cooking: Egg Rice

Another short post with a super simple, super cheap, and super quick Korean recipe for all my fellow broke students out there! When I used to live with my parents, my mum used to always make lunch for us when we got back from school (for some reason, I never did like school lunches). One of my favourites (and hers too, since it is so easy) was 계란밥, or egg rice.

There are two ways of cooking it; the first is with sesame oil, and the second is with butter, or margarine. I prefer mine with margarine, since it is a more rich flavour (in my opinion), but both are delicious.

Things You Will Need:

• White rice
• Eggs
• Soy sauce
• Sesame oil OR margarine
• Opt. roasted sesame seeds

Instructions:

• Cook white rice.
• Fry your eggs. Make sure they are just a little bit runny!
• Chop your eggs into little bits with a spoon.
• Add your cooked rice to the chopped up eggs.
• Add 1 large spoon of sesame oil OR 1 chunk of margarine.
• Add 1 large spoon of soy sauce.
• If you added sesame oil, add some roasted sesame seeds.
• Mix it all up, and eat!

Om nom nom 🙂

Signing off,
Marie

Korean Cooking: Bulgogi

Ever since I got hooked onto Pinterest (here‘s my board if any of you chums feel like following me there!), my interest in Korean food has grown. Usually I’m more of an Italian/Japanese/non-Korean food person, but looking at all the pictures of delicious, mouth-watering Korean food made me crave the kind of foods that my mother used to make for me when I was growing up. So! I’ve decided to start cooking Korean food, something which I thought would be impossibly difficult, since I am terrible in the kitchen, and Korean food requires so much preparation.

As the title of this post implies, I decided to go ahead first with some bulgogi (불고기)! I found this recipe here, which seemed to be the most similar to my mum’s recipe, and the simplest. I would rewrite the recipe here for any lazy bums out there, but the formatting on WordPress really isn’t the best, so I’m not going to attempt that at the moment. Whatever.

Unfortunately for me, the Korean grocery store was closed by the time I went out to get my ingredients, so I ended up having to get my beef at Kroger. I chose the sirloin bit, and since they didn’t have the machinery needed to slice the meat into paper-thin slices, I had them “fillet” the meat as thinly as they could…which wasn’t all that thin. But I marinated the meat in the sauce for about twice as long as stated on the recipe, so it balanced out in the end. Also, since the meat chunks were super thick, it ended up being more like marinated beef barbecue (양념갈비), but with the taste of bulgogi.

And the reveal! I had about 4 large servings of bulgogi with the recipe (I used about 1.48lbs of sirloin), which I stored by refrigerating them in a large bowl with foil wrapped around the top. Don’t make the same mistake as I did, and get actual beef cuts at an Asian supermarket (or somewhere with the right machinery!); it doesn’t affect the taste so much, but it wasn’t EXACTLY bulgogi. Oh well. Trial and error, everybody, trial and error. Delicious trial and error.

Signing off,
Marie

Broccoli Shrimp Banchan

Today’s blog is a little late (ahhh an hour!), so sorry about that! Couldn’t get up this morning for some reason.

Anyway, I finally was able to go grocery shopping over the weekend. Hurrah! So I was finally able to cook some of the delicious recipes that my mum had emailed to me. Double hurrah!

So without further ado, here is the recipe to banchan number 1! I don’t really have a name for it though, but you guys can suggest one? 🙂

Things you’ll need:
-Broccoli (the store had actually run out of broccoli when I got there, so I had to make do with some baby broccoli)
-Shrimp (the small kind)
-Garlic
-Oyster sauce (you can find this in the Asian food aisle)
-Vegetable oil

1. Slice up about 2 or 3 cloves of garlic into thin-ish sheets and fry them over medium heat with vegetable oil.
2. Get a pot of boiling water, and boil the vegetables and shrimp for about 5 minutes.
3. Drain the vegetables and shrimp, add them to the skillet with your garlic, and continue frying them.
4. Add some oyster sauce (a little bit at a time or else it’ll end up really salty!) and keep frying.
5. Enjoy!

Anyway, here is the big reveal…

I really like this recipe because it’s so easy and it’s super versatile as well. Have some carrots laying around? Add them to the mix! Don’t  have broccoli? Any green veggies will do! And yes, that is an Oprah magazine under my plate. I need to get around to cleaning my kitchen. Eventually. 🙂

Signing off,
Marie