Honey Soy Baked Chicken with Cauliflower Tots

 

Ingredients:

•  8 chicken thighs (bone and skin on) or  4 large chicken breasts
•  1/2 c honey or coconut nectar
• 2/3 c light soy sauce
• 4-6 cloves garlic minced
• 1 TBS ginger root
• FlavorGod Garlic Lover's Seasoning

Season chicken pieces liberally with FlavorGod Garlic Lover's Seasoning. Mix all other ingredients and marinate chicken for a couple hours or overnight. Set oven to 375 and bake chicken, uncovered for 45 minutes. Garnish with green onions and enjoy.

Chicken served with a side of cauliflower tots

How to Shabu at Home

Soup - so comforting and delicious on a cold winter night, but some times even during the summer one craves a nice hotpot of Shabu Shabu. For those of you who have not heard of Shabu Shabu - the diner is given a hotpot filled with hot kombu/dashi and when the water reaches it's boiling point the diner can start throwing in his/her meat and vegetables and start enjoy their dinner. Shabu Shabu gets it's name because of the swishing of the meat and vegetables, swish-swish is Shabu Shabu in Japanese.

Shopping list for this meal:

• Rice
• Green Onions 
• Goma Sauce (sesame)
• Enoki Mushrooms
• Napa Cabbage
• Thinly sliced beef
• Ponzu Sauce (bought from Shabu Shabu House Restaurant in DTLA)

It's not really hard to prepare for this meal, the only time consuming part was chopping up the vegetables into bite sized pieces. I made our dipping sauces first so the additional flavors I added can marry together. To the goma sauce and ponzu sauce I added green onions, pureed garlic, and hot sesame oil. This is just our preference you can pretty much add whatever ingredients you have on had to enhance the flavors of the sauce. Note to self you may not want to come here on your first date or if you must, just go easy on the garlic or don't use any at all. 

Thinly sliced beef.

Ponzu sauce mixed with garlic, green onions & hot sesame oil.

Napa Cabbage

Goma sauce with hot sesame oil, green onions and garlic.

Enoki mushrooms & green onions.

Shabu Shabu spread.

 Beef and veggies taking their nice hot bath before then enter our bellies.

Stay beautiful, and stay hungry!

Korean BBQ in the Comfort of Your Home

As a big fan of Korean BBQ, particularly the do-it-yourself aspect of it, I decided to try to make it for dinner. My boyfriend was a week away from taking the California Bar exam, so he needed to load up on brain food. Not sure if Korean BBQ would be characterized as "brain food," but it seemed to be a good diversion from studying.

Fortunately for us, there is a great Korean market right down the street from us -- Greenland Korean Market --, so I was able to pick up all the ingredients I needed for our dinner. While I was there, I also grabbed some things I was going to need for our Shabu Shabu night. [FYI: the Korean BBQ and Shabu Shabu dishes I am making this week are not part of my New Years Resolution, as I've made them before.] 

 

Here's what my shopping list for our Korean-themed dinner looked like:

• Pork Belly
• Soy Bean Paste
• Red Leaf Lettuce
• Green Onions
• Kimchi
• Sesame Seeds
• Hot Pepper Paste (already had some at home)

 I have to thank Maangchi for posting all her authentic Korean recipes online and making them available to those who want to learn to cook Korean dishes. From her website, I used her recipes to make: Pajori (Green Onion Salad) and Ssamjang (Soybean Paste Dipping Sauce), Kimchi Fried Rice, and Gye Ram Jjim (Steamed Egg).

 

Let's begin, shall we...

 Ingredients for Pajori with my addition of lettuce.

 The dressing for the Pajori is made from soy sauce, sesame sauce (I used both hot and regular), garlic, toasted sesame seeds & sugar.

 Dressing for Pajori

 Ssamjang (Soybean Paste Dipping Sauce)

 I also added some soy sauce to the soybean paste dipping sauce, just out of preference.

Ingredients for Kimchi Fried Rice.

 

A quick tip: it's best to used day old rice to make fried rice, as the hardened texture gives it nice consistency. I sauteed the day old rice with a little oil, garlic, kimchi, and some pork belly that I had cut up into bite sized pieces.  

Here I've added the green onions and hot pepper paste which gave the rice and nice reddish tint.

 Gye Ran Jjim (steamed egg). Only made with 4 basic ingredients. Water, eggs, green onion and salt. The authentic recipes calls for salted shrimp sauce or fish sauce but we didn't have that on hand so I just used some salt. Who knew this was so easy to make!

 Steamed egg mixed and ready to be cooked in the microwave on high for 5 minutes.

 No BBQ grill at the house, so we used the good ol' Foreman (which could have been the Hogan, if things played out differently) to cook the pork belly.

 Gye Ran Jjim

  Starting from the blue bowl going clockwise: Pajori, Gye Ran Jjim, Kimchi, Sesame oil with Salt and Pepper, Kimchi Fried Rice, Pork Belly, and Ssamjang. Yes that's some pretty awesome presentation, but like the saying goes, "You eat with your eyes first," hence the effort in the plating. 

 Pork Belly

 Pajori

Kimchi Fried Rice

    

It might seem like this whole dinner would take long to prepare, but actually only the cutting of the vegetables took a while. Otherwise, everything else I did was measure and mix ingredients the recipes called for. All in all, it was a great dinner. My boyfriend loved it, as we didn't have to venture out to get a Korean BBQ fix, but instead, enjoy it in the comfort of our home. And while it wasn't "brain food," per se, it was a great distraction to studying!

If you're a fan of Korean food, you should definitely take some time to peruse Maangchi website and try out some of her recipes. Hey if I can do it, so can you!

Stay beautiful, and stay hungry!