Cooking food that remind you of Home
Sometimes, when you’re feeling a little lonely, a delicious home cooked meal is just the thing we need. For international students especially, finding comparable dishes to back home is a real struggle.
Although there is nothing like flying back to Korea and having some spicy rice cake (Ddeukbokki), I decided a recreation of this dish will at least temporarily satisfy my home(food)-sickness. From finding the ingredients needed to create the authentic flavors to actually cooking the dish seemed like an overwhelming process at first. Yet, thanks to my Ddeukbokki family, friends who needed more Ddeukbokki in their lives, the entire process went by in no time.
Ddeukbokki
Serving size 6-7 people
For the ingredients you will need:
- boiled eggs
- rice cake
- thin glass noodles (vemecelli asian style starch noodles)
- fish cake
- lettuce
- onion
- spicy chili paste (gochujang)
- soy sauce
- sugar or corn syrup
- optional: green scallions
boiled eggs
thin glass noodles
fish cake
onion and lettuce
Recipe:
- Prepare all the ingredients by slicing 1/4 head of lettuce, 1/2 an onion, and cutting up the rice cake into long rectangular strips
- Boil the sliced onions with 4 1/2 cups of water
- Add around 4 heaping tablespoons of spicy chili paste into the water
- Add 2 1/2 tablespoons of soy sauce
- Add 3 cups of rice cake
- Add the fish cake (depending on your preferences I put in around 1 1/2 cups)
- Add 1 1/2 tablespoons of corn syrup or sugar (depending on how sweet you want the dish)
- Add some vermecilli noodles and lettuce (1/4 of the bag of noodles)
- Continue stirring during the entire cooking process as the sauce thickens into a paste like consistency
- Add the boiled eggs and garnish with some chopped green scallions
- Serve and enjoy!