Mr. & Mrs. Vandebilt + kids

The food in Korea leaves a bit to be desired when you first arrive. We had a really hard time adjusting and rarely ate any. We spent our first few months attempting to continue to cook ‘western’ food at home with little or no success. We just couldn’t get the ingredients we wanted and when we could they weren’t exactly the same. It was disappointing and expensive so around Christmas time we decided to just give up and start eating Korean. There’s a little restaurant underneath my school where I now eat dinner most nights. It is substantially cheaper to just eat a restaurant than to try and cook yourself. I almost never pay more than $4 for a meal. It took a little while to be accustomed to the different tastes, but I honestly rather enjoy the food now. We haven’t bought groceries in a a couple months and we seem to be surviving just fine.

So what am I eating? Well here’s a good look at it.

First our favourite meal in Korea – sumgyeopsal. It’s otherwise known as Korean barbeque. You can go to these restaurants all over Korea where you pay for meat based on a serving and then cook it at your own table. We normally get pork but you can also get seafood or beef. It is served with many side dishes, as is everything else in Korea. 

A staple in any Korean’s diet is Gimbap – Gim means seaweed and bap means rice. This is really similar to California roll sushi. It comes in many varieties, chum-chi gimbap (tuna), red bean gimbap, beef gimbap, pepper gimbap.

We eat a lot of soup here. There is soup served with every meal. Usually its ground up fish soup with some green onion. My favourite soup here is called Dwen-Jung Jiggae. I’ve also had Kimchi-jiggae and So-do-boo jiggae.

Bibimbap. Koreans love their rice. This is just a dish of rice topped with some veggies and maybe some meat or an egg. And of course, accompanied with hot sauce.

Yoo-Boo-Cho-Bap. This is one of Jacob’s favourites. A tofu shell stuffed with rice and other unknown things.

Korea’s take on pancakes. This one is filled with green onion. Another popular ingredient is octopus parts. I like mine vegetarian.

Bibim-mandu. Mandu are like dumplings (around the edge of the plate) and bibim just means veggies. There’s hot sauce hidden under the veggies.

Like I said, Koreans love their rice. This is rice dessert – rice cake! And yes those are beans not raisins.

And no post on Korean food would be complete without a picture of the treasured kimchi. Fermented cabbage in spicy pepper sauce. They make this once a year in the fall and then store it for the remainder of the year in a special kimchi fridge.