Rice cake finale

My final recipe from Hairy Bikers’ Asian Adventure — tteokguk, Korean rice cake soup! Yum!

I used vegetable stock, for the broth, since I only had one veggie stock cube left — one cube in 1.25L water was a bit feeble-tasting, though, so I’ll use two cubes next time.

It went pretty well otherwise — the beef mince and the eggy bits all turned out fine. The rice cakes were kind of interesting — faint savoury taste (obviously) and a texture rather like mochi. Quite nice, really!

The recipe said it made two portions, but I was able to stretch it to three — it’s pretty hearty stuff!

That’s all I have to say on this one, really…

Also, this is my last post before putting this blog on temporary hiatus — I’m sufficiently slammed with work that I have neither the time nor the mental energy to come up with interesting posts on the regular, and even though this blog is technically part of my business website, there’s very little to say about my work since I’m bound by a confidentiality agreement.

Keep cooking, folks — bon appetit!

Chickening out

Penultimate Asian Adventure recipe this week — Korean barbecue chicken!

It didn’t actually involve tongue-searing gochujang or anything like that (for which I was thankful), just the option to sprinkle sliced red chilli over the finished dish. I also got a bit of a spicy element from using chilli-infused soybean oil instead of sesame oil in the marinade.

I just used four boneless chicken thighs, rather than bone-in thighs and drumsticks (four of each), so as to simplify the preparation and cooking process. I cut up two of the thighs so that I could use them for my ‘eat the next day’ portion, along with a pack of pancakes-for-crispy-duck. I left the other two thighs intact for consumption immediately after cooking.

I brain-burped a little on the marinade, making the full quantity even though I was using half the quantity of meat, but it did provide me with a plentiful quantity of rich, tasty sauce — I placed the marinaded chicken into a steep-sided rectangular dish/tray/thing (that I’m pretty sure is supposed to be a cake tin) before grilling, precisely so that the marinade could mix with the cooking juices to form a sauce, as well as preventing the meat from drying out.

Thanks to my brain glitch on the ingredient quantities for the marinade, I ended up with somewhat more sauce than I’d expected, but that wasn’t a problem! The chicken turned out beautifully as well — moist and meltingly tender. With a few tweaks, this could very well be a recipe for the regular roster!