For christmas eve dinner, my aunt made a korean pork belly dish. Did you know that koreans are crazy about pork belly? Well, they are. I really wasn’t into this at all, but I did document it all so that you can witness. In the end, it ended up as little pork belly cabbage wraps.
Take some pork belly and cut it up into hunks that will fit into your steamer.
You can throw some of the onion skin into the water for the steamer. Then on top of the pork belly, you can throw in some sliced onions and sliced ginger. Then you steam this for awhile.
While that’s steaming, you can make some of the accompaniments. Oh, and also, get some napa cabbage already. You should try to use the inner leaves. And make up some fresh julienned radish kimchi. This has daikon, scallions, garlic, kochukaru, salt, and raw oysters.
There was also fish sauce in it. Let this sit for awhile to soak in all the salty flavors.
They also concocted another condiment. This stuff had little teeny salted shrimp, chopped jalapenos, and kochukaru.
And here are the final components. You take a leaf of the cabbage and stick a piece or two of the pork belly on it. Then you add some of the fresh daikon kimchi and a bit of that shrimp condiment. Wrap it up, then eat it. Everybody loved it, but it’s not really something that I was into. The pork is really porky, if you know what I mean by that, and I would have much preferred it to be grilled. Also, the pork belly had little bones in it. My mom said the bones would be mushy. She lied! They’re proper bones and they’re crunchy. Don’t worry, I didn’t starve, I ate some leftover tofu dish that my aunt had made the other day, and then later on that night, guests came over and the party snacks came out!

We went to Gaya to celebrate my uncle’s birthday. Man, are we boring, or what? We always go here! They got fancy new menus. Unless they’ve always been like this. But I swear these are fairly new.
As you know, they really do have an excellent variety and high quality banchan.
And they had my favorite spicy and sweet marinated raw blue crab banchan that day. Best. Banchan. Ever.
For any of you who complain about the fact that you have to cook korean bbq yourself, go here! You can cook it yourself if you want, but they are more than willing to help you out and do pretty much all the cooking for you. So you can kick back and just watch them do it. It’s totally good meat too.
I’ve eaten here several times and everything has been good. It truly is one of the better korean restaurants in the Philadelphia area. But, I have discovered that it is definitely not without its flaws. Take this yukgaejang here. This thing wasn’t that good. It was pretty darn bland and the meat was super blah. This is so not the dish to get here. So now you know!
Some tofu stew. This is good. I would venture a guess that most of their stews are good.
But the thing that was absolutely beyond amazing was the grilled spanish mackerel. And of course my picture is going to be crap and blurry. Oops. But it is amazing. It’s a beyond huge piece of fish and it’s perfectly grilled and it’s slightly crunchy on the outside and just freakin delicious. Damn I can’t stop thinking about it. It was a particularly slow night there so service was extra attentive. You need to get this fish dish!

We didn’t have turkey and stuffing and all that jazz this year. We decided to have a korean thanksgiving, which just means that on thanksgiving day, we ate korean food. Like these chicken wings. But oh, wait, these aren’t particularly korean. Heck, who’s keeping score?
But these spicy pork baby back ribs are definitely korean!
And so is this kalbi stew. There’s nothing non-korean about this.
It wasn’t just a meat fest though, we even had some fish.
Don’t worry, we didn’t only just eat the flesh of beasts. My aunt also made some japchae. She claimed that it was the best japchae ever. And well, she was kind of right. It was pretty damn good. Oh, but there was meat in this, but only a little.
More flesh! It’s fish again, but it’s dried and flattened and cut into strips and marinated with spices.
Last of the flesh, I swear! There’s some fish cake type stuff on the right, and the ones on the left are zucchini. Finally, we get some darn vegetables in this meal! Man, I ate a lot of the fish ones. I don’t remember eating any of the zucchini ones. Oops.
Some more veggies. There’s absolutely no animal product in this, I promise. And I didn’t eat any of this either, I promise.
And well, you really can’t call a meal korean if there isn’t kimchi involved. So of course, we had plenty. I ate some of this, and it definitely has vegetables in it. So finally, proof that I ate vegetables on thanksgiving!