The Art of Making Korean Food

Patience! That is the key to making Korean food. Most of you locals know that there is a new Korean market in Tigard called H-Mart. For Bill's birthday, I got him a Korean cookbook, so he could make ME some meals. Ha! We had been talking about making something for a couple of weeks now, but weekends get hectic and it's hard to cook an elaborate meal during the week. So with the Labor Day Weekend here, we decided to give it a shot.

Setting: Monday afternoon, going shopping at H-Mart. Not as crowded as last time and the kids are in a really good mood! We buy the ingredients we need to make Beef with Dangmyun Noodles aka Chopchae and a spicey tofu soup. We head home and hysteria ensues in the kitchen..actually, just a crying baby and two adults trying to get stuff done.

I start my soup since this can sit. Mine is simpler and just requires a couple of ingredients. After I am done, Bill starts his Chopchae..only we didn't realize that's what it was until I was stirring the noodles around. I finally looked at the page with the recipe and sure enough the second word was chopchae. I'm like "Bill, you just made chopchae, I wondered why it was looking so familiar!" So Bill was like WTF when I said this and proceeded to sit down on the couch and sigh. Here we thought we had made some meal that we'd never had before!

All in all, dinner was good. Definitely not my mom's cooking, but edible. Although Bill says that ours tasted better! Unfortunately Hannah bear woke up from her nap and needed attention so we were not able to eat the meal together (one thing I'm looking forward to leaving behind). After the meal was done, we both looked in the kitchen and was like "wow" what the hell just blew through here? Pots and pans and dishes everywhere! Perhaps we need to cook Korean more often so we'll learn how to minimize the dishes used or just not cook it anymore at all?