If you’ve eaten korean food before, especially in a party type of setting or at someone’s house, you may have eaten japchae. It’s kind of an iconic korean dish, for whatever reason. I actually am not crazy about it, but when people want to expose newbies to korean food, japchae is often used, along with korean bbq. It’s typically a side dish or an accompanying dish made of potato starch noodles, veggies, and sometimes meat. It’s often served cold or lukewarm. It’s not a hot dish. It’s really up to you what kind of veggies you put in it. So here’s a version that my mom made so that W could learn how to make this.

This is not a difficult dish to make at all, but it is manually intensive. You need some decent knife skills, or at least it helps. And it also will look a lot more attractive if you’re very good at julienning. So here we go. Julienne some carrots into thin sticks. In a pan with some vegetable oil, sautee them up with a little salt. Take a thing of kamaboko and julienne that up too. Sautee it up with a little salt. These were some dried shitake mushrooms. Soak them so they spring back to life. Then remove the stems and julienne the tops. Sautee this with some oil and salt. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Thinly slice up some onions and sautee with oil and a little salt until soft. I think you’re probably catching on by now. Feel free to use other veggies you like. Spinach is often seen in most japchae variations. My mom doesn’t like to put spinach in there as she feels it makes it spoil faster. Thinly sliced red, yellow, or orange bell pepper would have been a nice touch. You can also put egg in here as well. Mix up an egg, cook it in a big pan like a thin pancake and slice it up into thin strips. Really, make your japchae to suit what you like.

Thinly cut up some sliced beef. These are slightly still frozen so it’s easier to cut. Cook the beef up with some oil and a little salt.

Here are the potato starch noodles. You know these are the right ones because it has a picture of japchae on the package. Then it has to be right, right?

Cook these up according to the directions. They don’t take long to cook. Thoroughly rinse the cooked noodles in cold water.

Yep, that’s right, you have to heat these up a little too. Add a little oil, a little salt, and heat these up a bit.

Throw everything into a big ass bowl and mix!

I said mix!

Add some soy, some sesame oil, and some sugar. Add little by little, and adjust to your liking while mixing and tasting. And really, that is it!

Since my uncle is retired now, he hangs out in the house a lot, when he’s not at the gym. Aside from the pumpkin porridge, he also digs dumplings a lot. In korea, we call them mandu. It seems that pretty much every culture has their own version of a stuffed dumpling. Mandu can be boiled, steamed, pan-fried, eaten in soups, really, however you want. So when my aunt decided to make some, I decided to document it all. Here are the ingredients. The only things not shown are salt, pepper, egg, sesame oil, and garlic.

They used 3 bags of mung bean sprouts (the ones without the head) and steamed them up.

One head of white cabbage, cut into thirds, and also steamed.

These ingredients are going into a fine mix, so you need to chop up everything quite fine. Chop up all the sprouts, squeeze out all the liquid, and throw them into a big mixing bowl. Emphasis on the big.

Chop up the steamed cabbage as well. Again, squeeze out the liquid before throwing into the bowl.

Chopping up some kimchi.

When you squeeze the kimchi juice, it looks like bloody death!

They chopped up 3 bundles of green onions. No need to squeeze liquid out of these things.

Cut up the tofu pieces and squeeze the liquid out of those as well. You can use paper towl or a cloth of some kind. Whatever it takes, just make it up!

Chop up some garlic and throw it in there. Add salt and black pepper to your liking. Add a little sesame oil. Add one egg. And add the meat of your choice. Here, they added about a pound of ground beef and a pound of ground pork.

Now mix, baby, mix!

Once everything is mixed together extremely well, it’s time to make the mandu! They used dumpling wrappers bought from the store. There’s really no need to make your own. These work just fine, taste just fine, and are effortless. Take a spoon of filling and put it in the center of the wrapper. Use a whipped egg as the “glue” to bind the edges of the mandu together.

Squeeze the edges together so that it’s air tight. If you want to put pleats in the edges, do so. Really, do these however you want. There are no rules! Repeat for as many darn dumplings as you want. While you’re wrapping, use the filling in batches and store the unused filling in the fridge.

Yes, it’s time consuming and quite manually intensive. So do what I do and just watch! But once you’re done, you have tons of these lovely homemade mandu. These freeze beautifully!

My mom makes this korean style pumpkin porridge, or hobakjuk, and my uncle and my sister-in-law absolutely love it. Like it’s disturbing how much these two like this stuff. It’s ok to me, perhaps a bit on the bland side. But hey, some people seem to really dig it. You’ll see this made many different ways, but this is my mom’s way.

So I have no idea what kind of pumpkin this is. Or even if this is a pumpkin. My mom didn’t know either, she just knows which one to buy when she sees it. So first, you cut the pumpkin up.

Remove the seeds. If you want, you can toast these and eat them too!

Peel the pumpkin rind. To make it a little bit easier, you can microwave these for a minute or two. But just do whatever it takes to take the peel off.

Once peeled, dice them up and put it in a big pot.

Fill up the pot with water, to cover all the pumpkin and then some.

Then throw the pot on the stove and start cooking it. The pumpkin will cook, soften up, and you can try to mash it up so there are no more chunks.

Cook it up until it’s not chunky anymore and it’s boiling. I suppose that if you were inclined, you could use an immersion blender to help get rid of the chunks.

Take some sweet rice flour and add water so you have a sweet rice flour paste. I can’t tell you how much of flour or water, because my mom has no idea. She just does it.

Add it to the pumpkin and the whole thing will coagulate into a thick porridge.

Then add a can of sweet red beans and mix it all together. That’s all there is to it! You don’t even have to add anything else. You can heat it up and eat it for breakfast or eat it as a snack. Enjoy!