Korean cooking

Last Wednesday I had some friends over for some Korean food. Cathy, Nic's wife was in town and I wanted to cook a nice supper for them. For those who don't know, Cathy lives in Bolton, ON and Nic lives here in Victoria so they don't get to see each other much. After that I kept inviting people because I figured I was going to make a lot of food. Finally, four people showed up: Nic, Cathy, Sonya and Brandy (clockwise around the table starting with the guy that looks like me). Of course I made far too much food and will be eating Korean all weekend. Here is a bad close up of the food. I served: Beef Kalbee- marinated and BBQed rib eye on skewers, shown on the plate at the far end of the table that you can really see; Bindeadok – a pancake looking thing with vegetables and made mostly from blended mung beans (bean sprouts are sprouted from mung beans) seen on the plate I half cut from the picture (bottom left) served with a spicy sesame/soy sauce dipping sauce (in the little white plates); Kimchi chige – a stew or soup made from kimchi, dried and fermented cabbage and the national dish of Korea; and finally, sticky rice.

Koreans seem to attribute a lot of their good health to their mass consumption of kimchi. It’s good once you get use to it but it’s very much an acquired taste if you didn’t grow up eating it. I prefer it cooked in its soup form.

You may also be able to see several different strange looking bottles on the table. Coming back from Korea, me and Julia brought back several bottles of duty free alcohol. We also got some Korean rice wine and the little cups from Connie and Ray (Julia’s Aunt and uncle). So we had a bit of a Korean wine tasting. We started with a bit of the big brown bottle which had ginseng folk liquor in it. Very strong. The white bottle had mushroom wine in it. It was good but tasted very much like mushroom, which I think is very unusual in an alcoholic drink. The stubby little round glass bottle was the rice wine. Sweet and easy to drink. The other glass bottle at the end of the table that you can hardly see was ginseng wine. Much closer tasting to a white wine. As always, I was challenged to drink a shot of wine out of the little cup without touching it. I just barely made it. Good times had by all.

Thanks for the use of your camera Sonya.