nanoomi

There is no place like a farmers market – an interesting kaleidoscope of seasonal changes in itself to feel the relaxed livelihood of a community.

Last Sunday, I made it to the one nearby on Columbus Avenue between 78th and 81st streets, behind the American Museum of Natural History.  And I realized how the season’s best colors were all there together interwoven with warm air, slow walks, light chatter and laughs.  Without further ado, here come the colors of the summer. Read the full story

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, here is an easy kick for your chocolate biscotti.  They look ever so innocent with the dark chocolate color and hazelnut bits, but a subtle kick after a second or two will let you know things get more interesting here.  While the pairing of hot chili and chocolate seems no longer exotic or strange with spicy chocolate truffles and hot chocolate mixes spiced with chili powder in chocolate shops, the little impact of gochujang (고추장; Korean hot pepper paste) in chocolate still comes unexpected at home.

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As you may have heard, I participated in a cooking contest for multicultural families, sponsored by CJ Foods. They had four groups of 12 competing for finalist spots in the preliminaries. I made it to the finals and ended up taking home the 2nd place prize and W1,000,000.

The theme was to make a food that could globalize gochujang, Korea’s famous red pepper paste. I have watched a lot of Iron Chef, Top Chef and Hell’s Kitchen and have always played couch chef, saying what I would have done differently. This was my chance to finally enter a cooking contest and see if I was all talk.

One of the rules I’ve learned from those shows is to cook what you know. If I know how to cook any food, it’s Tex-Mex. My first job in a professional kitchen was at a Tex-Mex restaurant. And I’ve been making Ko-Mexican food since my first few months in Korea back in 2004. So something along those lines was logical.

But how to incorporate gochujang?

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By Kathy Fidler

Juinun Beantown, Goyang

On the northwestern edge of the city, about halfway to Ilsan on subway line three, there is a suburb called Goyang that is home to a wonderful little cluster of farms and specialty restaurants. There’s an herb farm, a mushroom farm, the tipsily entertaining Baedari Tradtional Wine Museum and makgeolli brewery, and outdoor grill restaurants specializing in just about any kind of meat you can imagine.

Up the road from all of these locations is a complex with the English name Beantown, housing a bean farm, a coffee house, a shop selling an impressive variety of homemade soybean pastes (doenjang) and chili paste (gochujang), as well as the only live turkey I’ve ever seen in the Seoul metropolitan area. Front and center in this delightful complex is a restaurant serving foods produced on the farm.

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Posted by shinshine

It seems that the growing popularity of Korean chicken in recent years has amounted to a “cult of crunchy, spicy, perfectly nongreasy chicken” which is only getting bigger with the quest for perfect recipe for “the other KFC” — referring to Korean Fried Chicken. Recipes from David Lebovitz to more recently in Saveur and Serious Eats, or the more of a kitchen lab experiment done by ZenKimchi are all pretty amazing to me who grew up eating a version of this KFC at home without putting much thought into it.

To offload some self-imposed pressure I feel as a Korean person offering another fried chicken recipe, I’d like to start with a disclaimer.  This is not one of the popular Korean fried chicken chain recipe secrets.  This is an updated version of what my mom used to whip up in a few minutes – lightly pan-frying chicken drumsticks then coating in the sauce of gochujang (고추장, Korean hot pepper paste), ketchup (yes, ketchup!) and corn syrup.  Simple.  Quick.  Delicious.  My sister and I devoured them every time.

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