A Happy Accident: Jeyuk 제육볶음

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Jeyuk

Time to wipe the cobwebs off my blog and start writing again. It’s been a while. How one maintains a travel blog after years of travel comes to a halt has floated in and out of my mind lately, but I’m not going to dwell on it too much and just see where things go. 

Last weekend we were supposed to have a potluck dinner with our friends and I was going to make “Korean Pork Bulgogi Baozi” from a recipe I found on Pinterest. Baozi or bao is more of a Chinese dim sum dish and I was intrigued by the title of the recipe. Bulgogi in my experience is usually a beef dish served over rice. I didn’t realize until I started cooking that I was most definitely not making bulgogi, but jeyuk -something I haven’t eaten since living in Seoul.

I spent way more than I wanted to on a nice cut of pork loin at Whole Foods (I refuse to buy low quality meat, so prices are usually higher than my wallet likes) and began the cooking process. Halfway through I found out the pot luck was off so I chose not to make the dough for the bao buns and put the filling over rice instead, as one would with jeyuk.

For those of you who aren’t fortunate enough to have feasted on jeyuk, let me give you a hint as to what it tastes like. It’s spicy. Really spicy. When we ordered it in Korea we would only order one serving and split it over extra rice to make it more mild. I can handle spicy food, but only to a certain extent. 

Once I realized I was making jeyuk, I needed to alter the recipe I was going off just a tad bit to make it taste more authentic. Here’s what I came up with: Continue reading →

A Summer in Squaw

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This post is more than a little delayed seeing as we are fully into Fall now and I’m only just getting around to posting pictures from our summer in Squaw Valley. Where we are living right now is gorgeous as you can see, but we miss our community in Boulder, so we are moving back. There’s also much more opportunity and more diversity… that should say a lot! I’m excited to have a year long lease in a city that I love. I want to change my traveling ways and settle down for a few years at least. I’m tired of packing up my stuff and I would love to own some drawers to put things in :)

Here’s a little taste of our summer in Squaw Valley and the surrounding area in pictures. Continue reading →

Making Dak Galbi in the USA

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If you follow my blog, then you know I think dak galbi is the most fantastic Korean dish EVER. I love it.

I love it so much in fact, that I’ve written about why it’s my favorite, the time we drove to another city just to eat dalk galbi in its hometown, and feasting on dak galbi in Los Angeles.  That’s three posts all devoted to one dish… and here’s a fourth.

I’ve finally tried to make dak galbi at home in the US and I was successful! There were only two small flaws in my cooking experience. The first is that I didn’t get ddeok because I couldn’t find it at the Asian grocery stores nearby. I plan on making it from scratch sometime, but that will have to wait for a different day. The second issue was that we didn’t have a dak galbi pan. Usually dak galbi is cooked on a large flat pan in the middle of a table at a restaurant. We are fairly limited right now in our cooking equipment so I did it in a deep wok. This certinaly cooked everything, but I didn’t get crispy bits like I would have had I used a flat shallow dak galbi pan.

For those of you interested in making awesome dak galbi at home, here’s a recipe I created from about seven different recipes I found online. I made this for just Dave and myself. I had one serving for dinner, Dave had two. Then we had some leftovers for lunch the next day. I would say it serves four if you aren’t feeding really hungry men.

Here’s my recipe for dak galbi! Continue reading →

Say what???

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I spent a lot of time in Korea grading mind boggling sentences like the one above. Most of the time they weren’t funny and I was left to find a way to turn them into intelligible statements. But sometimes there were real gems that would make me and the whole teachers’ room explode in laughter.

Disclaimer: I know it isn’t easy learning a second language and I applaud all of my students for trying their best. I laugh at these from a good place not a mean one. I know that I sure as hell have made people laugh quite a bit while traveling and attempting to speak foreign languages. I wonder what incredible things my Spanish teachers from middle school heard me say. I’ve been laughed at around the world for my silly attempts to communicate, and the ridiculous pantomimes that go with it. I don’t take any of this too seriously and I hope you don’t either :)

With that said, here is a countdown of my all time favorites: Continue reading →

It’s Raining Inside

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One of the many quirks experienced while living in Korea is the variety of apartment issues that come with a typical Korean apartment provided to a foreign English teacher. Problem #1 is usually the itty-bitty size of the apartment. I was super lucky coming to Korea with my boyfriend because we were given a two bedroom apartment, so space wasn’t an issue. Others aren’t so lucky. I will say that we were very fortunate to be given the best and the biggest apartment in our building. In fact, after we left Korea, the director of our school moved into our apartment. I’m not sure he knew what he was getting himself into though… I think he was accustomed to a higher end of living, so I wonder how he’s handling all of the issues that come with living there. For the current teachers, I think they can add having their director as a neighbor to their list of nightmares. Here’s a list of the apartment troubles we did have to deal with and the ones our director is probably currently struggling with. Maybe he’ll actually fix them now that they’re his problem. Continue reading →