Cookbook Survivor: Maangchi, Maangchi's Real Korean Cooking: Authentic Dishes for the Home Cook
Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living
This is not so much a case of throwing a long-shelved book into the arena to see if it survives my peevish annoyance with past failures or its particular way of presenting information as it is a welcome party/test drive for a new arrival. I picked this book up about four months ago after watching the author on her YouTube channel a few times but I haven’t had a chance to cook from it yet.
I find it really promising as I look through it. There’s a lot I want to cook here, and it’s organized in a way that I find very accessible and inviting. It’s the opposite of the “1,000 Recipes” approach—the subdivisions of types and approaches to food here make a lot of sense, and it does a nice job of building up a kind of underlying ‘grammar’ of the cuisine that helps a home cook understand the way to compose a meal and to assess whether the tastes are what they ought to be.
It helps that a lot that the staples of Korean cuisine have become more available and familiar in U.S. markets. I’m especially fortunate in that respect because I have local access to an H-Mart, the Korean-American supermarket chain that has a few outlets in the Mid-Atlantic region. H-Mart is a fun place to shop (cheap live lobsters!) so I’m always happy to have an excuse to head out there, though the drive from Swarthmore to Upper Darby can be pretty horrible when there’s a lot of traffic.
For today’s food, I’m going to make a classic Napa cabbage kimchi that I obviously won’t be eating tonight. I’ve been fermenting a bunch of chiles for the last three weeks and I just went ahead and made the sauce from that, so one of my fermentation jars is ready for business and I have a spare Napa cabbage that needs using.
Depending on how ambitious I am, I might make a couple of vegetable sides: green chile peppers seasoned with doenjang (fermented soybean paste), scallion salad, braised burdock root, and dried anchovies with nuts all seem kind of interesting to me and manageably simple in their prep. I keep doenjang around as a basic part of my pantry—mostly for making ssam sauce every three or four weeks. I like burdock root, thought that definitely requires a trip to H-Mart today if I decide to do it, as do the dried anchovies.
The main dish I have my eyes on is crispy pork with sweet-and-sour sauce. That’s partly because I need to use a pork shoulder I got from Philly Foodworks this past week, partly because I really like this kind of sweet-and-sour. The slightly perverse thing is that the dish is actually from Chinese restaurants, as Maangchi points out, but it’s in the book and I want to eat it.
This sounds really good, but probably too spicy for my current digestion, alas.