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.