Jeyuk Bokkeum (Spicy Stir-Fried Pork)

When I lived in South Korea, the husband and I would go out for dinner pretty much every night. There was really no reason not to; even in the swanky Gangnam area where we lived for the final three years, we could easily dine out for less than five dollars per person. As a result, I didn't learn much cooking while I was there.

Since we've come home, I've learned to cook several of our favorite Korean recipes, and they are delicious every time. There's one Asian market in town (that I know of, anyway) and it does well for most things but it doesn't carry everything I need. A larger market about forty-five minutes away has all the stuff I need, but who wants to drive forty-five minutes just to go grocery shopping? Not me.

As a result, my Korean recipes are a "charming" mix of genuine Korean ingredients and creative substitutions. So far, though, I have received rave reviews from my audience of one. (With our newly cleaned and renovated dining area, my audience will soon expand, I hope.)

Today, as you may have gleaned from the title, I made jeyuk bokkeum. This is one of the husband's favorite Korean dishes. It was never really one of mine, but it's grown on me.

Pop-tarts and chocolate sauce are not a part of this recipe. They are just IN THE WAY.

For the things you might not recognize: the tall red canister is gochugaru, or dried red pepper flakes. Next to it is gochujang, red pepper paste. Both these ingredients lend a rich spiciness to Korean stir-fry - and by "rich spiciness" I mean if you use a bit too much they will burn the roof off your mouth and clean your sinuses out for you.

The substitutions in this recipe are the bacon and the serrano pepper: Maangchi's recipe calls for pork belly, which...what? I have no idea where to find that. A butcher? Maybe? We have a butcher in town but I am not going to add yet another stop to my already ridiculous three-stop shopping routine (Target for most stuff, Dillon's for shallots [no seriously, that's all I get at Dillon's] and the Asian market for Asian stuff). Thick-sliced bacon it is! As for the serrano, it's my version of a gochu.

What I quickly discovered, once I got into Korean cooking, is that you can really just throw the stuff in the pot and cook. I use my wok for a lot of these recipes. Here, you can see everything has just been tossed in.

I serve this with rice. In this particular pictures I was just using minute rice, but I recently discovered that Target sells actual sticky rice, so I'll use that from now on. I also have no idea why there's a weird bright red juice coming from the meat.

How did this dish go? EFFING INCREDIBLE. Seriously, it was almost unbelievably good. We both ate way too much and..asdghuiafetbhj;. I just don't have words for how good this way. Try this recipe, for real.

Chicken Enchiladas

Of all the dishes I make, this one is requested most often and it is never, never the same twice in a row. I use this basic recipe: Chicken Enchiladas minus the 1/2 cup water because the filling is honestly pretty watery without it.

The fact that this recipe changes every time I make it has less to do with my ingenuity and more to do with my absolute inability to actually acquire all of the ingredients at the same time. After reading that recipe, you'd think I could manage something so simple, but no - I am always missing one or the other of the pieces.

Once (or twice...a month) I forgot to buy tomato sauce and had to improvise - without the sauce altogether, with canned diced tomatoes, with salsa. Once I bought tomato paste by mistake and used that and water. Once I didn't have enough sour cream. Once I bought the wrong size tortillas. Once I ran out of cheddar cheese and emptied all the bags of cheese in our fridge in desperation.

This time around, I didn't have parsley, which honestly doesn't probably change much, so I didn't worry about it. There was one final problem: I had bought, without realizing it, a cardinal sin in my kitchen.

Fat-free sour cream.

DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNNNNN *screams of children and the elderly*

Oy. I mean, it'll taste fine, but...*sigh.*

So anyway: browned chicken plus sour cream, cheese, onion, oregano, pepper.

In my non-stick pan that isn't, so much.

The next step is tomato sauce, salt, green pepper, fresh (!) garlic, and chili powder. When it's all mixed and hot, I have to wrestle the filling into my requisite Simply Balanced tortillas, cover with enchilada sauce (not taco sauce like the recipe says) and cheddar cheese, and into the oven they go.

Finished product:

Always, always a hit! Despite the fact that I never actually make it correctly. Yay!

Spicy Green Chile Chicken Lasagna

Full disclosure: I cook a lot of chicken. A lot of chicken. I could probably cook two solid weeks of chicken recipes without repeating any.

Tonight was a new one, something I got from 12tomatoes. We love chicken, we love Mexican food, and we love lasagna, so it seemed like a surefire hit. As much as I would like to say that I had all the ingredients for this dish, I didn't, but not for lack of looking. I just couldn't find crema anywhere, so I had to do without. I hoped it wouldn't affect the taste of the finished product too much.

And believe me, I searched for a substitute but all I could find that seemed even remotely workable was sour cream, and considering that there was already sour cream in the filling I decided against double sour cream.

After assembling all of my ingredients, I realized I had nothing to chop. Nothing. Not one single onion or pepper. It was a very odd feeling, and I didn't care for it much. I like chopping! Chopping is how I sublimate my aggressions!

I browned the chicken first, and since I didn't really know what else to do with all that free time, I had a beer. Normally I'd be chopping and grating and dicing and mincing but it was an oddly relaxing moment in my normally hectic kitchen.

Chicken browned, it had to be cubed and added to most of the other ingredients to make the lasagna filling.

With the cumin, chili powder, diced chiles, and green salsa, this lasagna should have plenty of kick. I'm pretty freaking excited. Time for layering! Once again, I'm using Simply Balanced pasta noodles, their oven-ready gluten-free lasagna noodles. I only have enough noodles for two layers, so I'm laying it on pretty thick with the chicken filling in between.

Dang.

DANG!

Covered with foil, and into the oven at 375 F.

Finished product:

Voila!

This one was a hit! Both of us loved it and it will definitely be a repeat around here. In hindsight, I will need to boil the noodles a bit before layering because the parts under the filling were tough and the parts outside the filling were mistaken for shells. ("I guess I'll eat around the shell." "It's not a shell. They're noodles.")

Introduction: Roasted Asparagus and Tomato Penne Salad with Goat Cheese

I love to cook, but I'm a little absentminded and a lot clumsy. I mess things up, I forget ingredients, and I misread instructions, but I have a blast doing it, and usually the results are okay. Even when they're not, they make for interesting stories.

The first recipe for this blog admittedly sounds a little frou-frou, but it's amazing how easily you can dress up your cooking with words. Like, I could say that I fried a steak in a pan and cut it up, or I could say that I seared a sirloin in extra-virgin olive oil and thinly sliced it. Suddenly I sound like a gourmet chef in a restaurant instead of a teacher/Target cashier desperately trying to keep the smoke alarm from going off.

I chose this recipe because I try to include two vegetarian recipes in every shopping list, but it's hard with a husband as meat-crazy as mine is. Any time I place a vegetarian dish in front of him, he's likely to say, "This is good, but do you know what would make it better? Meat." Yes, no doubt, but that kind of defeats the purpose of making vegetarian meals. Anyway, since most of our meatless meals involve grotesque amounts of cheese and pasta (three-cheese manicotti will make an appearance at some point, I promise you that), I hoped to sneak this veggie-rich dish past my carnivorous spouse.

The first thing I did was preheat the oven. Preheating is important, folks. I know some who poo-poo this step, but then they complain that their cinnamon rolls are underdone, so who wins that argument by default? I also started the water for the penne - I use Target's organic brand Simply Balanced whenever I can because it's affordable and delicious. Seriously, their tortillas (which will also show up in a recipe later) are to die for. I didn't even know tortillas could have a distinct flavor before Simply Balanced showed me the light.

Yes, that is a wooden spoon balanced on top of a lid set inside my cast-iron skillet. I don't have much storage space, okay?

While the water was coming to a boil, I snapped the asparagus and washed the cherry tomatoes, drizzled them with extra-virgin olive oil, and sprinkled them with what I later found out was way too much salt and pepper. I mean, the recipe called for 1/8 teaspoon each and I used 1/4 teaspoon each so it's not like they were drowning in salt, but it was still too much.

Kosher salt, btw, not the other stuff. I'm still too lazy to grind my own pepper, though.

The veggies then went into the oven to roast at 400 F. It was at this point that I realized I had not bought a shallot. This is largely due to the fact that the store where I do most of my grocery shopping doesn't sell shallots, and unless I remind myself a dozen times that I need shallots, I won't remember to go to the other grocery store that does sell shallots, so I usually end up substituting shallots with some onion and some garlic. Do you suppose that was the record for using the word "shallots" in a single paragraph? Shallots.

Anyway, aside from not being wildly fond of tomatoes, regarding onions the husband usually feels that less is more, so I almost never use a whole onion in any recipe, and I almost always have part of one in a Ziploc in the fridge for emergencies just like this. I diced up about a tablespoon of onion and pressed a clove of garlic and called it good on the shallot front. As a little side note, fresh garlic is an absolute must in any kitchen. Garlic powder and garlic salt have their uses, but nothing compares to the rich flavor of a freshly minced or pressed clove of garlic in a dish. Or several cloves. We really like garlic.

The not-shallot was joined by Dijon mustard, honey, and the juice of a lemon. In hindsight, there was quite a bit more juice in my lemon than I had anticipated, and I could probably have used about half that and called it good. As it was I was thoroughly enjoying my lemon corer/juicer that I got when I bought a set of knives and didn't really pay attention to how much juice I'd accumulated until it was too late. Herbs de Provence, salt, and pepper made up the spice of this honey Dijon dressing, and then I had to whisk in some olive oil to make sure it would actually stick to things.

Now, at some point the asparagus had come out of the oven and I was supposed to leave the tomatoes in to get a teensy bit softer. I left them in a little longer than necessary, and the tomatoes protested this treatment by oozing a bit. The pasta had finished and been drained as well.

The asparagus and tomatoes were cool, so I was supposed to cut the asparagus into inch-long pieces (hands up if you keep a ruler in your kitchen to measure this stuff. No? Me neither) and halve the tomatoes. Well, considering the fact that the tomatoes were just this side of juice, I figured I didn't have to do that, but I cut up the asparagus.

And took this slightly sinister picture, for reasons now unclear to me.

It was then officially assembly time. The original recipe calls for arugula, but once again my husband's finicky taste buds come into play - he's not a fan of arugula, considers it too bitter, so I basically substitute spinach in all of my recipes. The spinach, asparagus, tomatoes, and penne were all tossed in one of the lovely glass mixing/serving bowls I got for my birthday last year.

Yes, I am that person. I want kitchen stuff as presents. I also asked for prep bowls and a wok.

When the veggies and pasta were thoroughly tossed, I drizzled in my dressing and tossed that. The goat cheese came last, crumbled over everything.

"What's the white stuff?" I was asked.

The salad was served on plates and was not exactly a rousing success. I liked it, but I love basically everything in this recipe, while the husband is not a fan of half the ingredients. He thought the dressing was interesting, but there was too much of it, and after giving it several tries he's decided he just really doesn't like goat cheese. All in all, I call this a half-flop and probably won't make it again. To fix the problems he had with it would be to change the fundamental nature of the dish, so I guess I will just have to keep searching for a veggie and pasta recipe that we will both enjoy.

Tune in next time for Spicy Green Chile Chicken Lasagna.

Recipe:
Roasted Asparagus and Tomato Penne Salad