College Cooking 101 (part i)
This is my first public entry in quite some time. It feels a little scary, but hopefully it'll be for a good cause.
So, I've promised you all some sort of recipes, and I'm one to stick to my promises. This is how I'm going to do it: below the first cut will be a preface of sorts, that talks about how a Poor College Student (PCS) like me do to maintain a variety of food without going over budget. Then, beneath the second cut will be the detailed recipe with pictures. The final cut will be the recipe itself without the pictures, for the benefit of those who do not have DSL.
What a Poor College Student Can Do to Avoid Cafeteria-Food-Induced Insanity and the Instant-Ramen Syndrome
1) Take advantage of coupons and grocery store sales. Living in Hawaii, where everything is zomg-ly expensive, I've learned to be unashamed to appear "cheap." If you have a car, unlike me (woe!), also take advantage of warehouses like Costco.
2) Hoard on goods that won't easily go bad, especially you are like me and like to buy a large quantity of cheap goods at a time. Vegetables tha fall into this category include onions, cabbages, lettuces, carrots, bell peppers, potatoes, etc. That doesn't mean you should keep them for over two weeks, though, because after that they start to get too gross, even for me. >.> Wrapping veggies in newspaper can keep them green and fresh (Chinese wisdom!), but you may prefer plastic wraps. Meat can stay a really long time if you keep them in the freezer. Things that go bad easily include bananas, bread, and cucumbers (they turn into liquid when they rot. I just found one today). Seafoods also go bad quickly, and they really stink up the fridge.
3) Creativity is the key! Even instant-ramen can taste good if you know how to cook it.
4) Try to keep a number of things that are universially useful in your fridge and cupboard, so when you want to cook something on a whim you won't find youself needing to go to the store, which really kills the desire to cook. Things I keep include flour, eggs, all sorts of seasoning, some form of pasta, rice, canned soup, canned or frozen veggies, processed meat, and so on. I can generally whip up something I want in 15 to 20 minutes with this sort of storage.
After that general BS, let's get started with the Real Thing.
This is called Dok Bok Kei in Korean. Dok is made of glutinous rice, and is very chewy. It's very popular in Chinese and Japanese cuisines as well, and many know it as mochi. Though, mochi is generally sweet and the rice cake we're talking about here doesn't taste much. Thus, the heavy use of sauce. It's also commonly made into soup. It's one of my favorite Korean dishes! :D
Let's get started, shall we?
First, you need the rice cake. This is the one I used:
I got it in a Korean market, and I'm not sure if you can get it in your regular store. If not, I do have a recipe for making rice cake from scratch, though I've never tested it before and I hesitate to put up something I haven't tried.
Next, you'll need to soak the rice cake for about half an hour. The one I got was so hard after I put it in the fridge I had to saw through it with a knife.
In the meantime, you can chop up some vegetables you want to put in. It's common to put onion, green onion, and cabbage in Dok Bok Kei. Sometimes people put kimchi or minced meat. Sometimes they even put in noodles and an hard-boiled egg.
Then, you'll have to fix the sauce. I use 2 tablespoons of Korean hot paste (this I got from my local supermarket), 1 tablespoon of soy sauce, 1 tablespoon of crushed garlic, a few drops of seasme oil, and about 6 teaspoons of sugar. The sauce is supposed to be hot and spicy, so you can adjust the amount of hot paste and sugar you put in. The recipe here is a little spicy even for me (and I can eat really, really spicy), so you might want to put just 1 tablespoon. If you don't have any hot paste, I assume some hot sauce like Tabasco would do, but the taste may be a little off. After you're done, the sauce should look like this:
Now you have all your ingredients prepared, and the rice cake should be ready. Note, even after soaking it will be hard to touch, but once you put it in boiling water it'll turn into some chewy goodness! Now, boil a cup of water, about 230 ml. Then, put in the rice cake and the sauce. As you can see, the sauce has an annoying tendency to stick to the bowl. As a PCS, you may not want to waste the sauce. What I did was I scooped some boiling water from the pan and swirled it around the bowl, then poured the water back into the pan. I repeated the process several times until the bowl was clean. Try not to use tap water as that might dilute and upset the delicate balance of the sauce and water in the pan. ;)
Turn the heat low and let the sauce boil slowly. As the water level dwindles to half its original, put in the vegetables. Stir them around and watch the sauce thicken. The reason we add in the vegetables last is because we want them to stay crispy, so don't let them sit in there for too long. 3 minutes tops, I'll say.
Take the dish out and sprinkle white seasme on top. You're done!
Yaye!
Okay, here's the recap:
Ingredients:
Rice cake (Dok) -- as much as you like, but adjust water accordingly
Various vegetables (onion, green onion, cabbage) -- again, as much as you like
The Sauce -- 2 Tablespoon Korean Hot Paste, 1 Tablespoon soy sauce, 1 Tablespoon crushed garlic, drops of seasme oil, 6 Teaspoons of sugar
White seasme
1 cup of water
Soak rice cake in water for half an hour.
Cut vegetables.
Mix sauce ingredients into sauce.
Boil a cup of water, add rice cake and sauce. Use the boiling water in the pan to dilute the sauce remaining in the bowl.
Reduce heat. As water dwindles to 1/2 of its original, add vegetables. Stir.
After 2 - 3 minutes, scoop out dish and sprinkle white seasme on top.
Serve immediately.
Enjoy!