Who Says You Need to Travel to LA for Korean Tacos?

With a little inspiration from immaeeatchu and Kogi's BBQ korean trucks, we made korean tacos this weekend. They were so good! :) Here's a photo of a bulgogi and kalbi taco topped off with quail egg and manchego cheese.

Foodbuzz 24, 24, 24: A Freudian Feast - Devouring All the Stages of Development

Every so often our residency gets together for a potluck dinner and this month I was to host the dinner. Instead of the usual potluck dinner we usually have, I decided to try something different and fun for a change. Thanks for Foodbuzz 24, 24, 24 for sponsoring this event, I was able to do a fabulous celebration theme titled "A Freudian Feast, Devouring All the Psychoanalytic Stages". The menu is based on Sigmund Freud’s psychosexual stage theory, and with these stages I was able to bring out some of my culinary  creativity.

For those who are not familiar, the stages of psychosexual development include the oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital stages.  To make the dinner more appropriate for our guests and the general audience, I presented the stages in a rather discreet manner, utilizing subtle nuances reflecting the theme.

We had approximately 12 guests and to make it easier for our guests to identify their wine glasses, we created name tags featuring well known psychoanalysts. It was quite fun and interesting to see which psychoanalyst our guests identified with.  

The dinner turned out to be a success and our guest found the theme to be quite entertaining, perhaps this may continue with our future potluck dinners. 

The Freudian Feast Menu:

To start off the stages, we served a wide selection of beer and wine that fit well with the theme.  

Six different wines from one of our favorite wine shops, Moore Brothers, and a pitcher of prosecco with pomegranate juice. To keep the prosecco cool, I added slices of frozen meyer lemon slices and raspberries.

The first stage of psychosexual development is the oral stage.

For this stage I featured appetizers that were a perfect "mouthful". One appetizer would be enough to satisfy the guest, and then they would move onto the other stages. 

A favorite amongst the guests were the aromatic lamb meatballs, adapted by Nigella Lawson's recipe.
To stabilize the meatballs and to bring out more flavor, I added a dollop of greek yogurt

to the bottom of each meatball.

Other appetizers I featured were skewers of cubed cheese, olive and quince paste:

 and melba toasts topped with creme fraiche and allagash cherries:

Moving onto the next two stages of psychosexual development, here is the table spread:

The Anal stage:  This is the "noir and blanc" stage, which is where I featured a wide array of black and white food. Guests had a choice to tasting the "blanc", which includes a wide array of imported cheeses:

Fromager d'Affinois:

Taleggio:

Tete De Moine, which is a cheese from Switzerland that is thinly shaved into a beautiful form using a girolle. 

Some leaned towards the "noir", darker delicacies such as the black olves, chocolate and dulce and leche spread, mission fig preserves, and black truffle spread.

As suggested, a lot of our guests dabbled in both, and they were adventurous enough to try the Cahill's Porter Cheese.

For the phallic stage I made honey glazed cocktail sausages.



and dill roasted fingerlings..



To add to the theme, I filled our cow creamer with little gerkins and a Tete De Moine flower.

We're reaching towards the end, onto the latency stage. 

Pretty much this stage is dedicated to main entrees. A few of our residents are 

vegetarians, and the pasta primavera turned out quite well:

Ingredients

• 3 carrots, peeled and cut into thin strips
• 2 medium zucchini or 1 large zucchini, cut into thin strips
• 2 yellow squash, cut into thin strips
• 1 onion, thinly sliced
• 1 yellow bell pepper, cut into thin strips
• 1 red bell pepper, cut into thin strips
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 1 tablespoon dried Italian herbs or herbes de Provence
• 1 pound farfalle (bowtie pasta)
• 15 cherry tomatoes, halved
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan

Directions

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.

On a large heavy baking sheet, toss all of the vegetables with the oil, salt, pepper, and dried herbs to coat. Transfer half of the vegetable mixture to another heavy large baking sheet and arrange evenly over the baking sheets. Bake until the carrots are tender and the vegetables begin to brown, stirring after the first 10 minutes, about 20 minutes total.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta in a large pot of boiling salted water until al dente, tender but still firm to the bite, about 8 minutes. Drain, reserving 1 cup of the cooking liquid.

Toss the pasta with the vegetable mixtures in a large bowl to combine. Toss with the cherry tomatoes and enough reserved cooking liquid to moisten. Season the pasta with salt and pepper, to taste. Sprinkle with the Parmesan and serve immediately.

We love vietnamese food and Sunday Nite Dinner posted an excellent recipe on Ga Ro Ti, a vietnamese roasted chicken. 

For those who reached the final stage, we rewarded them with the most decadent dessert, a dark moist chocolate cake topped with strawberries:

Ingredients:

• 16 ounces good-quality semisweet chocolate
• 10 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 5 extra-large eggs

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 375°F.

Line the bottom of an 8 1/2-inch springform pan with parchment paper or aluminum foil. Coat inside of pan with nonstick cooking spray.

Chop chocolate into pieces. Cut butter into small chunks. Place chocolate and butter in a double boiler or in a large metal bowl over simmering water, making sure bowl doesn't touch water. Melt, stirring frequently, until smooth. Remove from heat.

Whisk eggs and a pinch of salt in bowl of an electric mixer, until mixture triples in volume, about 8 minutes. Fold chocolate mixture into egg mixture with a flexible rubber spatula until completely incorporated.

Pour mixture into prepared pan. Bake for 20 minutes. The center will still be a little soft. Remove from oven. Let cool at least 30 minutes before cutting. The center will sink a little as it cools. You can refrigerate the cake for up to 2 days (let sit at room temperature for 1 hour before serving).

Tartine Bakery

 
We just came back from a wonderful trip to San Francisco, and there's a lot to share from our one week experience there. I'll first start off with breakfast at Tartine Bakery, a lovely cup of cappuccino pairs well with..


the most heavenly banana creme tart with dark chocolate crust oozing with caramel filling.

Foodbuzz 24, 24, 24: Macarons Made 24 Ways

Macarons are perhaps one of my favorite desserts coming from Paris. Take a bite into a macaron and you’ll discover that the deceivingly hard exterior melts into your mouth into a soft almond meringue filled with decadence. They come in a multitude of flavors, and I usually prefer the classic fillings such as dark chocolate and dulce de leche. In Paris macarons are so popular that you even find them at McDonald's, which is featured in the photo above. :) After tasting so many macarons in Paris, I wanted to see if I could recreate macarons at home. It seemed like a simple recipe, involving only a few ingredients for making the macarons, and the results proved that it wasn't an easy recipe after all.

Of all the recipes I've attempted so far, I think that macarons are perhaps the one and only recipe that just never turns out the same. You can literally make 24 batches of macarons and your results will turn out to be 24 different macarons. For me no macaron turns out the same.



I decided for this month's Foodbuzz 24, 24, 24, I will make several more attempts to find out if an ideal macaron recipe exists. I have done extensive research on the internet about how to make macarons, surprisingly I discovered that every recipe is different from the other, which makes me curious to see which recipe would work best.

I have made my first macaron a few years back using David Lebowitz's recipe:

I filled the macarons with a dulce de leche filling. The macarons turned out pretty delicious, especially with the filling, but the texture was not at all like a true french macaron. I realized after making this batch that the egg whites were underbeaten, which might have resulted the flat, denser texture. 

My second attempt using A La Cuisine's macaron and buttercream recipe. This macaron turned out to be very pretty, notice no cracks on the exterior. Looking even closer into the innards of the macaron, I realized all of them were very hollow.  They lacked the chewiness that a macaron should have, and after a few hours they became quite hard and difficult to last for the upcoming days. 

Recipe #3 comes from Epicurious' Raspberry Chocolate French Macaroons Recipe. This attempt was perhaps one of the most disastrous, almost all of the macarons were cracked and fell apart as I tried to remove them from the parchment paper. As you can see, I made the macarons smaller and this prevented the macarons from cracking as much as the previous batches.  One notable mistake I made with this recipe was the egg whites were over beaten, which from my internet research may be the cause of the cracked macarons. 

More research on the internet, I recently discovered a "fool-proof" way of 

making macarons, which is very similar to a recipe I found on Tartelette's website for an espresso macarons. I substituted the espresso powder with matcha powder to make green tea macarons.

Matcha (Green Tea) Macarons
120 gr. egg whites, divided
35 gr. sugar
150 gr. almond meal
150 gr. powdered sugar
2 tsp. matcha

For the syrup:
150 gr. sugar and 50 gr. water

Sift the ground almonds and powdered sugar.

In a stand mixer, whip 60 gr. egg whites to soft peaks.
In the meantime, in a saucepan on high heat bring the water and sugar for the syrup to 230 F. on a candy thermometer.

Slowly add the boiling syrup to the egg whites and continue to whip on medium - high speed until they are completely cooled and you have a shiny meringue (10-15 minutes).




Mix the remaining 60 gr. of egg whites and the sifted almond/sugar and carefully fold into the meringue. Add the matcha powder as you mix.
Fill a pastry bag fitted with a plain tip with the mixture and pipe macarons about 3 inches in diameter on parchment paper lined baking sheet.
You can let them sit at room temperature for 20 minutes if desired. This is often done to assure those little feet at the bottom but I found that I can skip this step with this recipe and still end up with the same result. Bake at 320 for 15 minutes. Let cool.

Here's an example of a perfectly formed macaron..


Here's a photo of all the macarons I made for this recipe. I made 3 batches of these macarons and you can tell the difference from each batch. The first round I didn't fold the mixture enough, which resulted a batter that was more stiff. After piping the mixture to the pan, the macaron didn't settle and still had a piped form to the center. Realizing that the mixture may be too thick, I mixed it a few more times and did a test, piping a small amount on the pan to see if it fell without any remaining form. Here's an example of how the macarons should form on the parchment paper:

Firmly tap the cookie sheet pan a few times to ensure that the macarons form a firm base or "foot" and you can immediately bake the macarons without having to wait 20 minutes or up to an 1 hour. 

Recipe #4: La Tartelette's Red Tamale Macarons:

For the Macarons:
3 egg whites (I like to use 2-3 day old egg whites)
50 gr. granulated sugar
200 gr. powdered sugar
110 gr. ground almonds
3 Tb hot red powdered food coloring, divided
sparkling sugar

In a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, whip the egg whites to a foam, gradually add the sugar until you obtain a glosy meringue. Do not overbeat your meringue or it will be too dry and your macarons won't work. 

Combine the ground almonds and powdered sugar in a food processor and give them a quick pulse. It will break the powdered sugar lumps and combine your almond with it evenly. Add them to the meringue along with 1 TB food coloring and fold the mass carefully until you obtain a batter that flows like magma or a thick ribbon. 

Test a small amount on a plate: if the tops flattens on its own you are good to go. If there is a small beak, give the batter a couple of turns.Fill a pastry bag fitted with a plain tip with the batter and pipe small round onto parchment paper baking sheets. Preheat the oven to 315 F. Let the macarons sit out for an hour to harden their shell a bit and bake for 8-10 minutes, depending on their size. Let cool completely. 

So after all of these attempts, have I discovered the perfect macaron recipe? I definitely have, and I think all of the recipes featured above can be considered to be the perfect macaron recipe. I feel that all of the recipes have the potential to create perfect macarons, and it seems like what causes each macaron recipe to be different is what you make of it.  For my last recipe attempt, I made closer observations and made sure I didn't overbeat the egg whites, mixed the macaron mixture to the right "magna flow" consistency, and ensure "feet forming" of the macarons.  I predict in the future when I make macarons that I will never quite make a perfect macaron, and that's what makes these recipes interesting and challenging. Perhaps I will continue to add more version to the 24 or so different macarons I've created so far, and I'll never be disappointed with the results. They are always delicious.

Foodbuzz 24,24,24: Food for the Seoul

I am honored to be selected as one of the bloggers for Foodbuzz's 24 Meals, 24 Hours, 24 Posts this month. I decided to dedicate my theme to korean food, featuring my experiences from a recent trip to the South Korea and a dinner I made using a little inspiration from my trip.



Street food in Korea is quite abundant and there's quite an extensive variety every street corner you turn. We discovered the most street food around Insadong, which is a popular part of Seoul, and Busan, Korea. Around Insadong, there were more sweets such as pul bbang, which is a small cylndrical cake filled with sweetened red bean paste. Busan is well known for their fresh seafood since the city is located right along the east coast, we found most of the street food consistent of seafood such as oden, which is fish cake served hot and dipped in red hot chili paste.



Bungeo bbang, carp shaped red bean cakes, are my mom's favorite. It's quite similar to pul bbang but it has a more exotic shape.


Yut is a popular traditional rice/malt candy that resembles the texture of taffy. In most cases you'll find pumpkin flavored yut but there's also peanut flavored yut which has a richer and chewier texture. You can easily find yut just by hearing the clanging sounds the a yut candy maker makes:



On the weekends especially when there's a festival you can find ddeok, korean rice cake or mochi, being made fresh the old fashioned way.


First the glutinous sweet rice is steamed until completely cooked.





Once the rice is cooked, the rice is ready to be pounded by a wooden mallet. The woman in the photo is splashing hot water to prevent the rice from getting too sticky or cold for the mallet surface. The rice cake is dusted with roasted soy bean powder and sliced into square pieces. In comparison to ddeok I've tried from the supermarkets in the states and Korea, this ddeok has a softer and chewier texture, definitely worth trying if you're in the Insadong area on a weekend.

We also traveled to Jeju Island, which is right off the mainland. There we discovered some unique food that is well known to the island along with some unusual twists on American food.


Not exactly considered to be street food but worth mentioning is the fresh seafood served right the coasts of the island. Jeju is the home of woman deep sea divers where for many years women would dive for octopus, squid, abalone and other sea creatures.


Here are some of the varieties offered near the ocean, you can actually eat extremely fresh octopus that's still moving on your plate.


We decided to go with the less adventurous option, a plate of cooked octopus, fresh abalone and conch.

Not only does Jeju have the freshest seafood in Korea, it also has some of the most unusual street food I've discovered.
I've created a mosaic demonstrating what I've seen, which includes ddeok with the most intense colors, corn dogs that are chocolate and strawberry coated with sprinkles and butterscotch flavored with walnuts. Steamed multicolor corn and silk worms and snails, which is a popular snack in Korea but definitely something I didn't have enough courage to try. :)



Other than street food, there's a lot of restaurants that we checked out in Seoul and surrounding cities. One of my favorite finds was barbeque duck, which is served like kalbi but instead there's sliced fresh and smoked duck breast. I never had duck at a korean restaurant and I became more intrigued to see what else other restaurants were serving using this rare yet delicious meat.

(photo credit: minna883)

In addition to barbecuing duck, there are restaurants that serve duck roasted and stuffed with glutinous rice, and smoked duck in kabocha squash.  On the left is an example of both on one dish.  

I've never tried the roasted duck and it would be difficult to find such a dish in the Philadelphia area, I decided to make an attempt to create something quite similar at home. 

You can find frozen duckling at any frozen section in a korean grocery. For roasting the duck, I used
Tyler Florence's roasted duck recipe and stuffed the duck with a korean sweet rice called Yak Shik.

The recipe for Yak Shik is quite simple. Soak two cups of sweet rice overnight. Clean the rice by rinsing with water several times. Add pine nuts, chestnuts, jujubes (korean dates) to the rice, along with 1 cup of water, 2 tbsp sesame oil, 1/2 cup of brown sugar, and 3 tbsp of soy sauce. Cover pot and cook on medium high until rice is completely cooked.

Once you are done steaming the duck for 45 minutes, stuff the sweet rice into the duck until it's completely filled. Roast duck for 1 hour, glazing the duck with the honey/rice vinegar sauce ever 10 minutes.


The results are beautiful, the steaming removed some of the fat which results a wonderfully crispy texture to the skin.


Cracking open the duck, the sweet rice emerges and brings out a rich aroma. I'm not sure if this is exactly how the clay pot roasted duck tastes like, but I have to say this is quite a good version to try at home.



One of my favorite side dishes is ganjang gaejang, which is raw blue crabs marinated in a spicy red chili sauce. My husband wasn't too excited of trying raw crab because of the risks of deadly infections such as Vibrio vulnificus, so I recreated a version with cooked crab.


I have to say that the cooked crab version really didn't hit the spot, the raw crab version has a sweeter flavor that goes so well with red chili sauce.

Banchan:

Banchan is pretty much a bunch of appetizers served along with the main course and rice. The most popular of all banchans in kimchi, and there's quite a large variety of what else you can create. I'll be starting with some of of the easiest banchans first, which all have the same additional ingredients added to the vegetable. 

(from left to right:  kong {bean sprout} namul, gosari  {braken fiddlehead fern} namul,  sigumchi{spinach}  namul)

Spinach and bean sprouts can be easily found at any korean grocery, but this doesn't fall true when it comes to finding braken fiddleheads. It took me several grocery store trips to finally find the dried version. They usually come dried or you can find them already soaked and packaged in the refridgerated section. I prefer the dried version which brings out a more intense flavor. To prepare these ferns, first soak them in water for about 1-2 hours. Once they become soft and flexible heat the fiddleheads in water on medium high for approximately 45 minutes. The ferns should be easy to shred apart at this point. Drain and add thinly sliced scallions, 1/2 tsp of salt, 1 tsp sesame oil, and 1 tbsp of sesame seeds to the ferns. 

 

Follow the same directions for the spinach and bean sprout namul. It's quite easy to create all three side dishes since you don't have any change of ingredients and can use the same bowl to mix all the ingredients. 

Featuring more banchan, from left to right: purple sweet potato dressed with light mayonnaise, radish kimchi (for a great recipe, check out Maangchi's website), and sea tangle noodle salad.


Sea tangle noodles are made out of kelp and they're free of almost everything, fat-free, gluten free, very low in carbs and calories. To create this salad, I added 16 ounces of sea tangle noodles, 1/3 cup of mayonnaise, thinly sliced onions, carrots and cucumber. Mix all ingredients thoroughly and the salad is ready to serve. The noodles are extremely crunchy, if you want them to be softer you can soak the noodles in warm or boiling water for 10 minutes.



Kongjaban is perhaps the only banchan I ate as a child. It is black beans glazed with soy sauce and sugar, it is still considered to be one of my favorites because of its sweet and nutty flavor. This is my first attempt making this dish and it was very simple:

Ingredients
1 cup black beans (I ended up with slightly more than a cup)
3 cups water
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/2 cup sugar
1 tbsp corn starch
1/2 tsp sesame oil
2 tbsp sesame seeds

Add the black beans, water, soy sauce, sugar in a medium sized saucepan. Cook on medium high and continue to boil the beans until the liquid evaporates to leave a thick, syrupy consistency. Add 1 tbsp corn starch dissolved in water to the beans which will help thicken the sauce even more. Add 1/2 sesame oil and sprinkle approximately 2 tbsp of sesame seeds.


And finally, the dinner spread after an entire day of cooking. My husband almost ate the entire duck, it was so good and the sweet rice went so well as a stuffing. After being stuffed with dinner for a few hours, we moved on to dessert!

Patbingsoo

This dessert is perhaps the best dessert in Korea. My mom used to make this at home during the summer time and in Seoul, I had the ultimate version with shaved ice and ice cream, topped with candy jellies, mochi, red bean, kiwi, and yes, cherry tomatoes. In most asian countries, they have their own version of patbingsoo and they add all sorts of toppings that are sweet, such as beans, cherries, mochi, natto de coco, and whatever you can imagine.

Examples of patbingsoo in all other asian countries. 

(photos source:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/81226325@N00/205291091/)

Pretty much you can add anything you please to patbingsoo, so I decided to make my version at home. I used a friend's recipe for "pinkberry" yogurt: 

"Pinkberry" Frozen Yogurt:

32oz plain non-fat yogurt or greek style yogurt
1/2 c. light corn syrup
2 mini yogurt drinks
1/2 can Milkiss (original flavor)

Mix all ingredients until the mixture becomes smooth, add to an ice cream machine and you're done.  I also made matcha kudzu mochi using the following recipe below.


I sliced the mochi into cubes and added jellies, white mochi, pomegranate seeds and sweet red bean paste to the yogurt. There were so many ingredients that you couldn't see the frozen yogurt! The dessert turned out great, next summer I'll experiment and try all sorts of ingredients with patbingsoo.

This was quite an experience for me to cook all these korean dishes since I still consider myself a novice when it comes to cooking korean food. Thanks to Foodbuzz for allowing me to share my experiences in Korea and cooking korean food! I will leave everyone with a lesson on dancing to K-Pop music, thanks to Simon and Martina:

Hagi: Ramen Perfection

After many years of eating instant ramen, it's hard not to appreciate a really good bowl of tonkatsu ramen. We discovered a bowl of perfection at Hagi and I tried to replicate the dish at home.

Here's Hagi's version: check out the milky consistency of the broth, which is created by simmering pork bones for many hours.


..And here's my version.

As you can see in my version, it's not exactly the same as Hagi's version. I used beef bones instead which would produce a similar milky effect as seen in seolleongtang. I cooked the broth for approximately 8 hours and I wasn't able to achieve the cloudy broth effect seen in both dishes. Perhaps I need to simmer the bones for several more hours, some say for an entire day to extract all the flavor and color from the bones. After watching the broth for hours, I felt that the appearance and flavor wasn't changing significantly, so I gave up and accepted my broth as it was. The results were still very good, but creating the broth is still a mystery to me. Does anyone know how to achieve this effect?

Thanksgiving Leftovers: Ojingeo Soondae

Saffron Squid stuffed with "galbi jjim" sticky rice, quite delicious and we couldn't tell it was made from leftovers. :)