Buddying up

Seppo and I have buddied up to get motivated. I am Seppo’s buddy to encourage him/kick his ass/help him for his independent project, and Seppo is my buddy for learning to cook more Korean dishes.

There has already been progress! On the project front, Seppo has given me a list of engineering requirements as I had demanded, and I have started to set up my dev environment. I’ve given him a list of things I need from him in order to proceed further.

On the food front, Seppo and I cooked dinner for S & H tonight. Seppo made a zucchini & shrimp dish and grilled up the pork belly for lettuce wraps. He also mixed up two different accompanying sauces: a bean paste-based one and a salt, pepper, and sesame oil slurry. Meanwhile, I made brown & white rice, fake crab & cucumber salad (dressed in a soy & wasabi dressing), a spinach side, a bean sprout side, and a cold cucumber w/ rice wine vinegar dish. We served these with red leaf lettuce, cabbage kimchee, pickled julienned turnip & carrots, and three kinds of sliced pickled turnips (one was wasabi-infused, one was plain, and the third was mustard-infused, I think), all of which was store-bought. This was accompanied by some awesomely tart limeade supplied by S&H.

Dinner was followed by little shots of a ginger & cinnamon drink that Seppo made. This drink was extremely tasty but BURNED inside the mouth, so we ended up watering it down a bit. It was potent and delicious. After a short break, we shoveled some home-made Philly-style (no eggs) vanilla ice cream into our gaping maws.

As if this weren’t enough, at around 10pm, I decided I wanted to make this one Korean dessert that I had looked up in my new Korean cookbook. It’s a ginger-y fried “cookie” that is dipped in a cinnamon-honey-sugar syrup, sprinkled with ground pine nuts. The recipe is really quite unusual, calling for the following ingredients in the dough:

– flour (so far, so good)
– sesame oil (I knew this would be in there, so no surprises yet)
– ginger (yup)
– sake (really??? sake? in a doughy cookie??? ok…)
– maple syrup (whaaaaa-? ok, so clearly a Westernized recipe… it did give light corn syrup and golden syrup as alternatives)
– white pepper (OMGWTF?!)

The dough is an elastic dough and really reminded me of biscuit dough or even beignet dough. It certainly fried up like little beignets. I realized after I dipped the little guys in syrup that this was like the Korean version of gulab jamun, my favorite Indian dessert.

I am looking forward to more cooking adventures! Who wants to come over?! As we get photos off the camera, I’ll post them to flickr and to the woefully neglected food blog as well.