I’ve been subjecting the family to a lot of Korean food these days and it’s all thanks to watching too much kshows, I tell you. I don’t know how many times I ran to the kitchen in the middle of the night to cook myself a pot of ramyeon while watching Boys Over Flower, how many times I craved for beef japchae watching City Hunter and how many times I wanted to reach for the phone and order me some chicken (and beer) while watching You From Another Star (chimek, remember?). And every time the folks over at Running Man had food games, I found myself wanting to eat tteokbokki, kimchi and jjambbong.

Lately, I make the kids and the husband eat a lot of pork cooked in this particular sauce / marinade from Bibigo (that’s supposed to give a BBQ-à la-bulgogi flavour to the meat) :

For the kids, I make it with the sauce without the heat. It’s a really easy one pot meal and I modify it to suit the children’s palate. I just fry sliced onions, shallots, and garlic with shabu shabu pork that’s marinated with the sauce, add some cornstarch and an egg to make a thicker gravy and pour everything on a bowl of hot rice.

The kids love this. For myself, I add the heat with the red pepper version and kimchi on the side, and we all have a hearty rice meal like that. When we do eventually get sick of pork, I figured I’ll be doing the same with chicken and beef.

When in need of soup, the fastest thing I’ve done is to boil a pot of water with a huge tablespoon of bean paste and throw in some ready-made, frozen vegetarian Korean dumplings.

Now, that’s so much faster than what we usually do for Chinese cooking. Every time we want to have soup, we have to start boiling pork or chicken bones with red dates, huaishan, beiqi and goujizi by 3pm so we can get soup that tastes like soup (and not water) by 7.

It’s not a big hit with the kids as compared to my Chinese soup but hey, if they need some liquid to go with their rice, we can have it like that too.

I recently also made the popular ikan bilis Korean side dish which was a big hit and something everyone loved. I referred to The Domestic Goddess Wannabe‘s instructions here, but modified them by airfrying my ikan bilis in my Philips Airfryer first and threw everything in after heating up the sauce. I used roasted sesame also, instead of toasting sesame seeds in a dry pan as she suggested:

I made two versions – one spicy and the other with honey soy. They were super addictive!

And for me, no dinner experience is complete without a bit of japchae. This is the dish I get to vary however I want, because I am usually the only one eating (and finishing) it. Here’s a step-by-step guide which I referred to to make my japchae, again adapted from The Domestic Goddess Wannabe.

I usually boil the sweet potato vermicelli instead of soaking it. I’ve added beef on one occasion, and pork on another with garlic, shallots, onions and whatever that I could find in the fridge – carrots, radish, cabbage, mushrooms. The tip is to fry the hardest veg to the softest, and the meat last, and then the noodles with the seasoning however you like it.

I’m hoping to share more about what I do at home making Korean food, because right now, I can’t get enough of it! Do you love Korean food too? Share your links with me or reveal where’s good to eat Korean and what’s good to have in Singapore!