Gamja Tang (Pork-On-The-Bone Soup): Quite a Misnomer

Some dishes are named after their main ingredients, such as mashed potato, eggplant parmesan, and chicken fingers (not fingers, obviously). Although the dish I had for lunch, Gamja-Tang (potato soup), uses potato, its main ingredients is pork.

The word gamja has two definitions: the more common meaning is potato, while the less known meaning is the spinal cord of a pig. The Gamja-Tang is made with broth from a pig's spinal cord. It is apparently a great hangover food.

The waiter set the table with basic banchans, which included cabbage kimchi, radish kimchi, sweetened anchovies, and long green peppers.

After a while, she brought a pot full of all the ingredients in the soup. The soup technically wasn't cooked yet, so we had to wait until it boiled and all the juices came out. The soup had clear noodles on top with huge scallions, chewy flour dough, and big chunks of back bone in the bottom.

The soup finally begins to boil, and you can see the spicy red broth emerging on top! The soup had very rich flavor from the juices from all these ingredients.

Even though the pig's back bone was rather fatty, the pure meat itself was so tender and juicy from being boiled in the water. It also had lots of savory flavors from the spicy sauce.

The best part about the dish is the very end when the waiter makes fried rice with the remainders from the soup. There are vegetales, seaweed, fish roe, and kimchi in the fried rice.

Waiting for the rice to crackler at the bottom...

The fried rice was full of rich flavors from the soup. You don't need to add any extra seasoning or sauce.

Diligently scraping the pot with a spoon. Yummy!

HOWEVER, because I don't particularly enjoy pork, I packed my own food from home: Bibimbop! Every day I have been at home and not dining out, I have eaten bibimbop and yet still don't get sick of it. This bibimbop had spiced radish, regular radish, squash, and lotus root.

I'm really going to miss this delicious food once I am back at Harvard...

Baking at Home: Sweet Potato "Bread"

I love to eat, to take pictures, and to write about food. However, I don't have much experience cooking. The last time I tried baking at home, the cookies turned into biscuits because I didn't add butter (I substituted it with apple sauce). Hey, at least they were healthy.

I tried my luck again at healthy cooking today. I was surfing on the web when I stumbled upon a recipe for sweet potato bread. Because Mom had asked me a few minutes earlier whether I wanted to eat sweet potato, I knew we had the most important ingredient already at home. The recipe only required sweet potato, milk, honey, and egg, so I thought, "Why not bake?"

First, grab the sweet potato and washed them in cold water. I thought my hands were going to freeze! I made sure to scrub the skin to get rid of any dirt.

Next, cut each end of the sweet potato.

I sliced them into pieces so that they would cook faster.

Put the washed & cut sweet potato in a pot and boil them until cooked. It's best to poke it with a toothpick or a fork to check whether they are cooked all throughout.

While you wait for the sweet potato to cook, get one egg and separate the yolk.

Whip the white egg until it becomes bubbly. The more you whip, the softer the bread becomes at the end.

Once the sweet potato is cooked, take it out of the boiling pot and peel the skin. Make sure to peel them when they are hot (but not extremely hot that you burn your hands!) so that the skin comes off more easily.

Mash the sweet potato ruthlessly.

Add the egg yolk and 100ml of nonfat milk. I had to improvise the recipe because we didn't have milk. Instead I added soy milk.

Whip and mash the mixture until it becomes smooth.

Add the egg whites into the mixture and gently whip toss and fold them together.

Put the finalized mixture into a microwavable plate/dish.

Spread evenly so the sweet potato cooks throughout.

Pop it in the microwave for 7 to 8 minutes. Oh, the convenience of not having to use the oven!

Tada!

Decorate it with whatever "toppings" you want (fruits, nuts, and/or whipped cream right before consumption).

The sweet potato "bread" did not have any bread-like texture or flavor. It tasted just like mashed sweet potato, just a bit harder, more dense, and in a distinct, rectangular shape.

Because the sweet potato already had a sweet taste, I didn't add any sweetner, honey, or sugar. The rich flavor of the sweet potato permeated throughout the whole product. The outside was slightly dry, but the moistness remained inside.

Cheers to a healthy dessert/snack!

From Chicken to Noodle: Wang Be Sung Again

For the sake of increasing diversity in my blog, I tend not to visit the same restaurant and post about it. Yet there is one and only Chinese restaurant that my family goes to in Korea: Wang Be Sung. We modified our order from last time so I don't feel too repetitive.

Since my brother joined us this time around, we also ordered a big dish called "Gganpoongi," or fried chicken wings in spicy chili sauce. Unfortunately, one of my New Year's Resolutions was to avoid fried food, so I didn't eat the chicken, but I have tried it before last summer.

About 20 pieces of chicken legs are fried, tossed in slightly sweet and spicy chili sauce with chopped vegetables (carrots, bell pepper, onion, and scallions), and served on a huge plate.

You can tell that the chicken was fried right before being served. Underneath the crispy surface is moist, juicy meat.

It's impossible to take a bite of this chicken without saying, "ho, ho" from the heat.

Usually fried food tastes the best when eaten right from the fryer, but this chicken is tasty even when cold.

As we were enjoying the "appetizer," the waitress brought the noodles. Jjampong, or spicy seafood noodle, had so many different types of mushroom, greens, and seafood piled on top. We had to let it cool before diving into the dish.

Judging from the oil floating on top, I am guessing that they added a spoonful of chili oil to the broth for the extra spiciness. I didn't try the broth because it looked too red.

I only had the noodle and the mushroom, which didn't entire soak up all the spices. Still, the noodle was a bit salty from too much pepper seasoning, but it needed a hint of salt.

The noodle had a very chewy texture.

Next came jjajangmyun, or noodle in black paste sauce. Like I blogged about last time, Wang Be Sung has the best jjangmyun because they don't put pork, cook with less oil, and has abundant vegetables and shrimp.

The sauce and the noodle came out separately so the diner can control how much sauce to pour. We put the whole thing.

Again the noodle was equally as chewy as the one in jjampong without the chili oil smothered on the surface. When I was little, I used to taste the noodle before it was mixed to judge the quality of the restaurant based on the noodle. Wang Be Sung's is supreme!

Spicy and Savory Korean Snacks

When I come to Korea, I don't necessarily want to gorge on filet mignon, escargot and caviar, or lobster tail at a four-star restaurant. Instead I want to try food that I can't easily obtain in the United States.

A couple days ago, my aunt brought some to-go food for dinner. I hadn't eaten since 10:30 am that morning, so anything edible at that time looked delicious.

The seafood dish with bean sprouts in red chili sauce was extremely spicy. There were so many types of sea creatures, including a huge octopus that we had to scissor, scallops in shells, shrimps, a whole squid, a fish, and abalones.

The dish was enough to feed seven people. We even had leftover with which we added some kimchi, seaweed. and rice to make delicious fried rice.

Personally the sauce was overwhelmingly spicy with a hint of sweetness that didn't go too well. I was tempted to wash the bean sprouts in the water to get rid of some of the sauce. The bean sprouts were overcooked because it lacked some of the juicy and the freshness. The seafood, especially the crab, was too hard to eat so I just bit into it and the juices oozed out from the shell.

Aunt also bought soondae, or Korean sausage made with pig intestine on the outside and clear noodle and vegetables inside. It may sound disgusting, but it's one of the snacks I used to love when I was little. Eating too much of it is nauseating, but it tastes really good with some salt and pepper. The intestine used to wrap the fillings is jerky, while the insides are like the fillings in the dumplings.

There were three different types of soondae. One of them was quite spicy, while the other was overly chewy. The gray, triangular one is liver--it has somewhat of a bitter taste.