Jessica's Dinner Party

by jessica yoon

asian

Cold Black Bean Soup With Noodles

 

Korean summers are excruciatingly humid and hot.  Temperatures will rise above the 90s and for a few weeks monsoon season hits so it rains cats and dogs.  Fortunately, throughout my life I have only spent a handful of summers there. I love being there and it’s where I call home, but summer is just not its best season.

 

One great thing about summer in Korea though is the cold noodle soups.  They’re cool, refreshing, and very flavorful.  The most common and popular cold noodle soup is probably, naengmyun, 냉면.  It is made with buckwheat noodles and a cold broth garnished with julienned cucumbers, asian pear slices, half a hard boiled egg, and pieces of steamed pork belly.  It’s a bit complicated to make naengmyun from scratch, which is why they sell packages of naengmyun “kits” in Korean/Asian supermarkets. Everything is included, so all you have to do is boil the noodles and pick your garnishes.

  

  

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Stir Fried Potato Side

Continuing with my love of side dishes, here is one that is good for both summer and winter.  It is stir fried potatoes with onions and green peppers.  Many potato dishes are heavy and unhealthy (ex. french fries, hash browns, baked potato with the works) but this one is light, nutritious, and deceptively delicious.  A little salt and heat brings out the great natural flavors of this starchy vegetable.  Whenever my mom set this out before dinner, my sister and I would slowly sneak a few chopsticks-ful until none of it was left when we actually sat down to eat!

I had a hankering for stir fried potatoes the other day so I went to my second best resource, this Korean cookbook, for the recipe.  A red light should’ve gone off in my head when I copied down five green bell peppers, but I guess my mind was not functioning very well because I didn’t think twice about it. So, I went to the grocery store and bought two yellow potatoes and five green bell peppers.  Once I started cooking, I began to feel like there were one too many green pepper slices but I just kept on cutting away.  Seriously, I was like a robot, strictly following illogical directions!  I blame it on the heat.

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Sweet and Spicy Cucumbers

A traditional Korean meal has a lot of side dishes.  Some appear at the table all year round like kimchee, spicy fermented cabbage, while others are more seasonal.  I love the site of a Korean dinner table because it is always crowded with so many plates of food.  It looks like a mini food festival.

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Zucchini Pancakes

Zucchini Pancakes | Jessica's Dinner Party

Everyday around 4 pm my stomach starts to grumble a little bit.  No matter how filling and satisfying lunch was, at 4 pm food begins to enter my thoughts.  It’s been engrained into my body to want an afternoon snack ever since I was a little.  When I got home from school my mom always had a little something prepared for me to eat.  I remember mango slices, dumplings, mini hamburgers, and strawberry yogurt.  My favorite, however, were Korean zucchini pancakes.  They are slightly doughy with a soft crunch.  The subtle sweetness of the zucchini paired with the salty tang of soy sauce and vinegar is perfection.

Zucchini Pancakes | Jessica's Dinner Party  Zucchini Pancakes | Jessica's Dinner Party

On Sunday, as I was slowly coming out of my food coma from brunch, I started to think of these savory pancakes.  I had a couple of zucchini in my fridge, flour, eggs, milk, and sugar, the ingredients typically included in a pancake batter.  All I needed now was the exact recipe.  I called the ultimate source, my mom, and was surprised to hear that you only need two main ingredients, zucchini and flour.  How simple!  The recipe is so easy and fast that you’ll be amazed at how delicious they are.

Zucchini Pancakes | Jessica's Dinner Party

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Browned Tofu In Spicy Soy Sauce

In general, I don’t cook Korean very often.  I have a tendency to be drawn towards rustic Italian dishes or interesting ingredients like quinoa and wheat berry.  These foods feel more exotic to me so many times I skip the Korean and cook up something I’ve never eaten before.  I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but I do think it’s a bit sad that I barely know how to cook what I call my comfort food.


To redeem myself a little bit, there is one Korean dish I know well and have almost mastered.  It is a browned tofu in a spicy soy sauce.  In Korean it’s called tubu chorim, 두부조림, which roughly translates to tofu boiled in sauce.  It’s very easy and fast.  It does require a couple of Asian condiments like soy sauce and sesame oil, but if you don’t have those in your pantry I highly encourage you to get them.  Soy sauce is well known, but sesame oil may not be.  It is a vegetable oil made from sesame seeds that is intensely fragrant and used in many Asian dishes.

 

 

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