During my year as an exchange student in Korea, I ate Korean food to my heart's (and stomach's) content. Growing up, we weren't exposed to many kinds of Korean food. A typical dinner at my house was rice, a veggie dish (like broccoli), chicken or fish dish and a side of kimchi. (I can't live without kimchi!).

I never had dduk bokki until college, when one of my roommates made it for me. And I'd never heard of things like soondae (blood intestines), jipo (dried filefish) or galbi jeem (these are all things I LOVE now) until I was 21 or so.

So the year I spent in Korea opened up a whole new world of cuisine and delicious eats! The funny thing is, even though I ate soooo much in Korea, I weighed the lightest (of my adult life) during that time. I think it's because I had no car and did a lot of walking. Also, living in a dorm at the very back of campus on the side of a mountain probably helped.  The walk to my room was killer -straight up hill and up 5 flights of stairs!

When I got back from Korea I started to cook Korean food at home. I found two Korean cookbooks written in English but they were terrible and the measurements always seemed off. To cope I would find the same dish in both books and come up with my own recipe based off both books. There was a lot of trial and error going on!

One day I was googling random Korean recipes and came across koreancooking.xanga.com.  I was sooo thrilled! All the recipes were so easy to understand and in US measurements! (This is another awesome site Bee created. I found this site first and then came across Bee's wedding site). I learned how to make miyuk gook, galbi jjim, spam musubi and kimchi gook from this site. Also, I would use the site as a reference for other dishes I sorta knew how to make but needed confirmation on ingredients and quantities.

When Suseok oppa came back to the US he brought me 3 awesome Korean cookbooks. Literally translated they are "Making Side Dishes for 500 won," "Making Soups and Stews for 1,000 won," and "Setting the Table for 2,000 won."


My Korean isn't very good by any means but the books have step by step images and the directions are very easy to understand for beginning Korean readers. The great thing about the recipes is that all the ingredients are easy to find and for the majority of the recipes you don't ever have to step foot into a Korean grocery store.  Oppa and I have made tons of the recipes in these books and so far everything has come out tasty. Today we used the side dish book and made Busans-style seafood pancakes. More Here...