My stab at Nangmyeong

I've been exploring my Korean culinary side by experimenting with different dishes I start to fall in love with, from eating out at various places. My first stab at Korean cuisine was through making Pajeon. Pajeon is simply Korean pancakes filled with spring onions and other seafood. It's fried up in a lot of oil and makes for a pretty delicious snack. When I started making Pajeon my batter would always turn out real watery and I couldn't fry it in enough oil. This made for a pretty gluey pajeon. Although, it was still edible, it still wasn't real pajeon. After many trial and error runs I've finally figured out the right consistency for the batter and the right amount of oil to fry it in.

I made tteok-boki as well. But, I'm not counting that, because it's ridiculously simple to make. Tteok in Korean is rice cakes. So all you do is heat up the rice cakes in a pan and add the spicy sauce and cook it for 3 minutes. It's another one of the favorites here. It's good 2 AM-on-a-weekend food when you want something to soak up the alcohol.

Okay, so my next big dish that I tried to make yesterday was Bibim Nangmyeong. I found all the ingredients at the local grocer. Nangmyeong is comprised of Buckwheat noodles, a tons of vegetables (mostly cucumbers), and kuchu-jang (another one of those really spicy sauces) . It's a fairly simple dish and you don't really have to cook anything aside from the noodles. You'd think that I could handle that. Well the noodles are supposed to be be very chewy and I wasn't sure how long to cook them for in the water. I ended up leaving in the first batch of noodles a wee bit too long. I thought I could salvage the noodles after draining them out, but too bad I didn't have a colander. It just turned into a disgusting goop of gelatinous buckwheat sitting in my pot. Nolan suggested after it congealed together we could probably slice it up and make it into our own version of Nangmyeong pie. But I wanted real Nangmyeong.

After pouring the mush of buckwheat noodles into a plastic bag, we ran over to Top Mart to buy a colander. My second attempt ended up being pretty successful. I forgot to take a picture of the final product. But I hope you can take my word for it, that it turned out pretty good and there were no left-overs.