A Taste of Nature and Tradition

Upon recommendation from one of my uncles, we visited the Hantaek Botanical Garden (한택식물원). Opened in 2003, the garden is home to more than 9700 different varieties of plants. While the gardens themselves may not be awfully breathtaking or impressive, what is most important about this place is the research and preservation that takes place there, including preservation of rare and critically endangered flora.

The garden also hosts numerous educational programs for schoolchildren. In addition to studying the flora, children can study insects and animals that make their sanctuary here, such as fireflies and crawfish.

After our immersion in local fauna, we went to Seoil Farm (서일농원) to get a taste of traditional Korean cuisine. Founded 30 years ago, the farm and its restaurant have since won numerous awards and certifications from a multitude of traditional Korean cuisine institutions. Specifically, it is famous for its wide variety of refined fermented foods such as kimchis, chili pepper pastes, and bean and rice pastes.

Stored in porous earthenware called onggi (옹기), these various pastes and kimchis were then used to prepare a sumptuous feast for us. Unfortunately I couldn’t really get any good photos of our meal, with the lighting inside the restaurant being dim. But the food was delicious, and I found this picture from the Korean tourism website:

Image from visitkorea.or.kr

 

Signing off,
Marie

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