A New Perspective

When I first started this blog, I had intended for it to be more of a reflection of the fun eats that Philadelphia had to offer. However, I quickly discovered that I neither had enough time nor the pocket change to go gallivanting across the city when the mood struck me. What with classes soon to start, I'll have even less time for my frivolities.  With that in mind, I decided to tweak the purpose of this blog. Since I am a college student, and one of the hardest things to do in college is to maintain a a consistent diet - I'll be focusing a lot on quick, simple recipes that I make in my own dorm as well as quick and yummy eats that I find on Penn's campus. There will still be the occasional gluttonous journey downtown and I still haven't forgotten about my tiramisu adventure, but I do think that this new perspective will be more relevant and useful for the readers as well as a motivator for me to keep on cooking :)

Having said that, this is what I had for dinner tonight: (first meal to come out of my new (tiny) kitchen!)

Bi Bam Bap! It is probably my favorite Korean dish of all time. It's so perfect - it has a little bit of everything that is amazing: rice, veggies, meat, egg AND spicy hot sauce. Need I say more? The summer before I started college, I worked at a Japanese restaurant and practically lived off of this dish because the kitchen made it for us for dinner every night. There are so many variations for this dish: chicken/beef, carrots/radishes, spinach, cabbages/lettuce......YUM.

I used a pretty inexpensive piece of meat since we are college students after all :). I think this was a shoulder cut? Any type of meat would work although if you wanted to be authentic, go for bu gol gi. H-Mart also sells pre-marinate bu gol gil for about 6 dollars a pound.

First step: marinating the meat. I used soy sauce, sesame oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder, srirachi, and mirin (for a little sweetness).

Used about 2 tbs soy sauce, 1 tsp sesame oil, 1 tsp garlic powder, 1 tsp salt, few cracks of pepper, drizzle of srirachi, and 1 tsp of mirin.

Stir fry the vegetables:  used button mushrooms, (shredded) carrots and (strips of) zucchini with soy sauce, salt and sesame oil.

Also blanched some spinach and cut some Romain lettuce.

Cook an egg and put it all over a bed of rice! I like my egg the traditional way with the runny yolk but feel free to cook the egg completely.

What the dish looks like once you mix in the secret ingredient: spicy pepper paste (Gochujang). We didn't actually have any so we went to Koreana and the nice lady gave us enough for dinner and then some. Yay Koreana!