Week 9 - Korean

I wrote this back in March, but I think I was waiting to publish it until I had finished all the weeks in-between. I'm not planning to go in order anymore since I'm so behind, and this is posted pretty much as written two months ago.

We love Korean food, but I had a really, really hard time choosing a dish for this challenge. I wanted to avoid anything too spicy, so that eliminated a bunch of dishes, and I also needed to skip anything with ingredients that required a visit to a Korean grocery store, since we were doing our best to not go out while all the COVID variants spread around the city. (Present day note: We were not vaccinated at the time, and no timeline had been announced for our age range yet.) My initial thought was pajeon, but at the time I was trying to choose a dish, B was in the middle of an anti-green food phase, so that was out. Eventually, after watching a bunch of YouTube videos (in Korean and English), I decided to try out a type of hotteok that was potato pancakes stuffed with cheese. I didn't follow any specific recipe, but tried to put them all together for the ingredients we had.

The ingredients for the hotteok, which I decided to make vegan for my lactose intolerance, were:

- 2 large Russet potatoes ($1.23)

- 2 pinches of salt ($0.02)

- 1 tsp sugar ($0.03)

- 1 tbsp cornstarch ($0.10)

- freshly ground black pepper ($0.02)

- large handful of shredded mozzarella cheese ($1.67)

- 1 tbsp vegan butter ($0.16)

The cost for the hotteok was about $3.23. We ate it with a can of green beans and some smoked salmon, but not sure how much the whole meal cost since we bought the smoked salmon almost four years ago on a trip to Vancouver. My guess would be that the entire meal was under $10 though.

The steps for making the hotteok were:

1. Prep - peel potatoes and chop into large chunks.

2. Add potatoes to small pot of cold water with a pinch of salt, bring to a boil, and then cook potatoes until fork tender.

3. Drain potatoes, add to large mixing bowl, and mash.

4. Add pinch of salt, sugar, cornstarch, and black pepper to the mixing bowl, and mix well until smooth.

5. Take small handfuls of the potato mixture, roll into a ball, and then flatten out into a bowl shape in your hands. Add a little mozzarella, and then close up the potato to seal in the cheese. Roll into a ball again, and then flatten into a disc.

A bit of an uneven flame...

6. Melt butter in skillet over medium low heat, and then add the potato balls. Cook until both sides are golden brown.

The finished product tasted like mashed potatoes with a slight hint of cheesiness. It probably would have been cheesier if I had used non-vegan cheese or a different brand, because this one wasn't super cheesy in flavor. They were good for B, because it meant mashed potatoes without having to use a spoon. Overall, they just tasted like pan-fried mashed potatoes. Glad we tried it, but might try a different type of hotteok next time.

Week 20 - Julienning

How is it already mid-May?! The last time I finished a post here, it was the end of March, still cold outside, we hadn't been vaccinated yet, and most people were still taking the pandemic seriously (or at least pretending to). I'm so behind on the 52 week cooking challenge posts and the Around the World Cooking Challenge posts and the WorldEats posts that I think I might need to start doing shortened versions for some of them, so that I can still track/share our journey but not have it be such an overwhelming task. The Week 20 challenge seems perfect for a quick entry.

Challenge week: 20

Theme: Julienning

AtWCC country: Philippines (counting for both challenges, see below)

What we made: Pancit, based on a Filipino cooking class we took

How much it cost (with breakdown): $21.67 (dinner for 3 + two lunches for 2)

- 1 lb noodles - $3.99

- 1 package of Short Cuts roasted chicken - $5

- about 1/2 lb of shrimp - $3.87

- 1-2 lbs of carrots - $1

- 1 bunch of celery - $1.59 (probably only 1/2 bunch but the other 1/2 froze and had to be thrown out)

- about 1 lb of snap peas - $3.50

- 1 yellow onion - $0.37

- minced garlic - $0.05

- a couple big scoops of chicken broth - $1

- a few tbsp soy sauce - $0.45

- a few tbsp oyster sauce - $0.85

Challenge quick review: I could have done an entire dish of julienned vegetables, but we were already scheduled for a pancit cooking class, and the carrots needed to be julienned, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to knock out this challenge without spending hours in the kitchen trying to precisely chop vegetables. I am not the best with making exact sizes and shapes when chopping things, since they're all going to end up in the same place anyway and close has always seemed good enough here.

As for the pancit itself, I did a lot of the prep and A did most of the actual cooking, and it was so good. It tasted like pancit you might get at a restaurant. Since the recipe isn't really public or ours since it was from a cooking class, we don't feel right going into any further detail on the "how" in another post, so I'm going to count this for the AtWCC here too. We did explore something new (for our kitchen), which is the whole point of that challenge. We have a lot more noodles, so I see a lot more pancit in our future!