Today was a good food day. First a great lunch and then a nice evening meal. However, I will only share the lunch at this time. I will save the evening meal for a future post.

Before I start with the lunch, I will first share something that it uniquely Korean.

Here we have metal chopsticks and the long metal Korean spoon. These are used together to eat a Korean meal. Metal chopsticks are sometimes a bit harder to use since they do not have as much friction as wooden chopsticks.

Next we have the tabletop stove that is commonly used in cooking of Korean food. To the right is a housing for a replaceable gas canister.

So with the preliminaries out of the way, here is what we had for lunch today. It is called Dak Galbi and is a specialty of Chuncheon, South Korea.

We started out with a large pan being set on our portable stove. The pan was filled with spicy marinated chicken, cabbage, sweet potatoes, onions and tteok (a thick rice paste noodle). These ingredients are all mixed together with a traditional Korean chili paste call gochujang.

The mixture is heated up on the portable stove while the diners stir the food and make sure that it is evenly heated. You can see the steam coming off the food in the picture above. Once the food is ready to eat the heat is turned down and the yummy Dak galbi is spooned out into individual plates.

The food has a rich color and also a rich taste. You want to eat it all up, but know that you need to leave some behind for the next step in the progression of this dish.

Rice and vegetables are added to what is left in the pan and then it is cooked some more so that the rice absorbs the rich sauce from the pan. Again, the food is portioned out to everyone.

The rice tasted really good. Especially as it had absorbed the nice spicy sauce left over from the earlier cooking process. The pans were then picked clean by my students as no one wanted to leave any good stuff behind.

Here we see the remains of the meal. It also reminds me of one thing that I didn’t mention before. The dak galbi tastes really good when wrapped in radish slices. You can see stacks of the radish slices in some of the small bowls.

Altogether a great meal to share with my students before getting  back to the classroom.

Steven