Our first date was the day after Valentines Day 3 years ago. We never really did much for VDay because we loved taking advantage of the empty restaurants the next day. This year we wanted to have dinner somewhere we had never been and try a food we had never eaten. Hub’s group mate is Korean and always talks about how good Korean food is so we took a shot and tried a Korean restaurant. I got a dish called Bibimbap and hubs got bulgoghi. In short- we fell in love. We had never been so drunk with pleasure while eating this food. We HAD to learn how to make this. The bulgoghi tasted like an Asian fajita and the bibimbap basically was the happiest version of fried rice I had ever had. Plus they give you 10 or more small little dishes to add to create different flavors. So what we made tonight was a hybrid of bulgoghi and bibimbap.

Ingredients for beef:
flank/skirt steak
1 kiwi (skin removed)
1 onion quartered
2 whole green onion stalks
2 T sesame oil
2T sugar
3T rice wine vinegar
1/4c low sodium soy sauce
3 cloves of garlic
2T cooking Sherry

Put the onion and kiwi in a blender or food processor and puree. Add the rest of the ingredients (excluding the beef) and blend until smooth. Add the marinade to the beef in a plastic bag or bowl and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or overnight.

Marinating

As for the other small dishes we wanted to add on the side, we bought already made kimchi. I was surprised by how much I loved this because I was expecting to get my socks blown off with spice. It has some spice but the acidity of the fermentation is wonderful! When looking at the various kinds sold at our Asian market, the one main factor I was keeping at eye out was for MSG added. The kimchi I bought looked good, had no MSG plus you couldn’t argue with the ingredient list. Another quirky thing is when you open the jar of kimchi you will notice that a) it is sealed and should “pop” when you open it the first time and b) it should bubble a little like its carbonated – that’s how you know its some good kimchi

It only looks intimidating!

Can't argue with that ingredient list

Another side dish I made was some marinated cucumbers. Cut the cucumbers into bite sized pieces and add rice wine vinegar and sesame seeds and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

The last side we made were quick pickled radishes. Peel a diakon radish and cut into very very thin pieces. Mix them with 3T of vinegar, 2T sugar, 1 T of salt. Marinate for at least 2 hours.

Radishes

Once the beef has marinated, throw it on the grill and cook to your general preference. When the beef is on the grill, make some steamed rice (we threw it in our rice maker because sometimes its ok to be lazy). Once the beef is done, take it off the grill and let it rest on a cutting board. During this time, we did a quick fried egg to where the yolk is not set at all. When you cut the beef make sure to cut against the grain because it will be a lot easier to eat.

MMMM beef

Assembling:

There are two ways you can eat this yummy dish. The first way is to eat it bibimbap style. In a bowl put the rice on the bottom and place your beef on top followed by the egg. Around the edges of the bowl put as many side dishes as you wish and SWIRL! The more mixed the better so that the yolk covers everything.

The other way is to eat it bulgoghi style in a lettuce wrap. Using a head of rinsed iceberg, put all that you want inside a lettuce cup and dig in!

The amount of things we had to buy was surprisingly small. We really only needed flank steak, daikon, cucumbers, green onion, kimchi, kiwi and a lettuce head. Total grocery bill = $15.14 and the whole recipe made 4 servings so total is $3.79 a serving. Nutritionally we didn’t do too bad with a serving having 539 calories, 18g of fat, 29.6g of carbs and 61.9g of protein! Yaay Korean food!

All the characters are together