Last Christmas, so my first xmas with my in-laws, my mother-in-law kindly asked me to make some Korean food. Now, it may sound simple, but believe me, it was not.

My in-laws know very little about Korea - they had no reason to until *this* one came along.
And one thing about Korean food, is that it's spicy. Most Korean dishes are not complete without a spoonful of chili powder and I wasn't sure how my new nephew nieces were gonna handle it.

So I was on my quest to find non-spicy yet traditional Korean food that is easily approachable and also easy to make, just in case my mother-in-law wanted to try out the recipe herself.

The first thing that came into my mind was Galbi.
This particular recipe is Galbijjim(갈비찜- 'jjim' means steamed)and I have not found a single person who did not like this recipe.

This is my go-for recipe whenever I am asked to make some Korean food for those who hasn't tried Korean food before, and with little help of Korean BBQ marinade which you can now find in most grocery stores in their Asian section, this dish is very easy to make.

For those who can not get Korean BBQ (Galbi) marinade, my favourite Youtuber Mangchi has a video making Galbijjim from scratch so you can check that out.

For those of you, with excess to cheat sauce can now proceed to finding ingredients

For this recipe you will need:
1 lb Beef for stew (or cubed chuck)
1 medium size onion
2 medium size potato
1 carrot
1 Tbs sesame oil
1/2 Tbs sesame seed
1/2 cup water
1 1/2 cup Korean BBQ marinade
(Optional)
1 bell pepper
1 cup of chopped broccoli

*Oh and also white rice to serve this dish with!!

This recipe is one of those where you can feel free to through in any scrap vegetable you might have and in my case, I thought I might use up some frozen veggies so I added broccoli and bell pepper.

1. Marinate your beef overnight (preferably. at least 4 hours). 

2. Once your beef is marinated, heat a pan (large high rise skillet or pot would work) with oil, and toss in your onion and beef to brown.

3. Once beef is brown on the surface, add in your vegetable. If you added more vegetable than recipe has suggested, feel free to add more marinade with water (I added 1/4 cup since I like lots of vegetable for my Galbijjim) and stir well.

4. Simmer around 30 minute uncovered until vegetables are fully cooked and sauce has reduced.

(if you like the sauce, cover the pan/pot while you are simmering)

(Although not necessary, if you like to thicken your sauce, you can add a pinch of corn starch once it's been simmered)

5. Add sesame seed and sesame oil with chopped spring onion (if you have any) to garnish

 6. Now it's done!

On the day of Christmas, the day I was supposed to make Korean food for everyone, I prepared
this Galbijjim(갈비찜), Dduckguk (떡국 Rice cake soup for new year), Fish cake soup(오뎅탕), and Cucumber Kimchi (오이김치). Without a surprise, this was an obvious winner of the dinner whilst all dishes had their own fans.

This is an easy dish to throw on the stove if you wanted to taste something Korean and do definitely try out. You will love it.

xDaughter-in-law

        

Christmas is over for 2014 but it's never too late to upload pretty pictures from December, the most festive month of the year! For a Christmas lunch I hosted, I rocked these two edible Christmas trees, each inspired by TastyKitchen's pin on Pinterest and one of my favourite YouTube channel, Ochikeron. 

On the left, is 'Christmas Tree Cupcake' and for this I baked green portion of Duncan Hines Holiday Velvets layer cake to get 12 cupcakes and used green cupcake icing with leaf nozzle to decorate. At first I had to use a ton of icing to get the height I wanted and later, I realized hiding a strawberry inside the icing would not only look awesome when halved (just like TastyKitchen's pin) but also help me save time and calories. I also sprinkled Nonpareils JOLLY MIX to give more xmas vibe to the tree. For the topper, I wanted to use a star but I couldn't find anything that resembles a star in Walmart so I just went ahead with cute Santa chocolates instead.

On the right is 'Christmas Tree Sushi / Rice ball' that Ochikeron has created and I loved it! Her video is attached below so definitely check it out if you are planning next Christmas food already. Unfortunately, I couldn't get Salmon Roe or Tuna Tartar from where I live so I replaced Tuna tartar that sits inside the tree with Tuna & majo mixture (added a dash of sugar too), and went without decorations on the tree. Still really cute, in my opinion. I hope this post brought you the joy of Christmas again, if not inspired you for next year and I thank Tasty Kitchen and Ochikeron for awesome recipes!  

December was full of events, so I seized the opportunity and tried many Pinterest recipes I have saved up. To my surprise, I haven't had any #pinterestfail (btw, I love watching pinterestfails sometime. Some of them make me laugh so hard!) and I wanted to share some of my favourite #pinterestsuccess 

To the left, you have Cheeze bread! I have seen this recipe over and over from magazines, blogs, instagram, pinterest etc etc, so I had to give this a go. I got my inspiration from BeanTownBaker's pin  and as you can see, it looked awesome!! Since I had pesto left in my fridge, I rubbed it in with olive oil and mixed sliced cheddar with mozzarella. Perfect potluck idea of all time!

This pretty wreath was inspired by Living Locurto's pin and was definitely the highlight of my Christmas party. It's made with mini sausage wrapped in crescent roll, sprinkled with parsley and baked for 20 min. The ribbon was made out of bell pepper (or paprika I call) and together it booked soo pretty. I served this with sweet chili sauce and was definitely everyone's favourite of the day. 

This was a brunch idea, also seen over and over again on pinterest. I love how versatile Pillsbury rolls can get and throughout whole December, my fridge was always stocked up with Pillsbury's Cresent Roll, Cinnamon Roll and Biscuits. 

For this particular recipe I used Pillsbury Grands Cinnamon roll with  Apple Smoked Bacon from Trader Joes and have I told you that it's about the BEST bacon you can get over the counter?! Trader Joe's bacon combined with cinnamon makes a killer brunch. 

I knew this moment would come but I did not know it would come so soon. 

So this is where I got kinda lost. 

The recipe itself was super simple but the whole time I was asking myself, 'am I doing this right?'.

This dish has a very creamy texture and honestly I think it's better paired up with other lighter dish as it can feel very heavy. My husband loved it but personally, I would've liked this more if there was less sour cream and more Cream of Chicken. Oh, speaking of, I have never heard of cream of chicken until I saw this recipe. I just could not picture what on earth could be cream of a chicken and more I imagined about it, worse it got. When I actually picked up the product, (to my relief) it did not look anything like what I had imagined but much like a pumpkin soup with a wrong label.

Enough intro said, now let's check out the ingredients. 

According to the recipe there are only 5 ingredients for this dish; 

1 can Cream of Chicken

8 oz Sour Cream

3 cups Cooked Chicken 

1 Ritz cracker

1 stick of butter

The alternation I made was to replace cooked chicken with 2 cans of Chicken Breast and Ritz cracker with some leftover pita chips and I halved the butter. After all I think these changes didn't affect the dish too much (not that I have previously tasted this dish though) so if you try to cut calorie or go easy, try a can or low fat sour cream/half stick of butter.

I won't call this dish necessarily cooking, coz the recipe was easy as mix all ingridient shown in picture above. Also, preheat your oven to 350F degree.

And this was the visual I got... yeah.... this is where I got REALLY lost. Still not quite sure if it's supposed to look like that but oh well it tasted good.



Now I smashed my cracker, placed it on top of the dish, poured melted butter to finish.

Then it went into the preheated oven (350F) and baked for 30min.

And this is the final visual! It served as a good 5 meals paired with other dishes. I think I might try this dish again, just to be sure (I like to give up to 3 chances ;)), but will certainly try more cream of chicken for less cream of sour cream the next time. And the cracker on the top, by the way, is what makes this dish. It doesn't affect the taste or anything but I think it gives a nice crunchy texture to this otherwise creamy dish so if you are trying out this dish, don't forget it!

Since we moved to states, this has never quite happened but when we were living in Korea, we ALWAYS had rice around. Rice is like bread there. It's just there and when it's gone, you get a new batch.

Just like old bread, there were times I just did not feel like eating the old rice and needed an excuse to get rid of them so I can cook a fresh batch.

Well, only if I knew, this recipe would've been a perfect one to use old rice (not spoiled! maybe a day or two at max) up.

Anywho, just like many of you, I no longer have cooked rice sitting around at home but what I do have is good old Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup and minute rice.

Ahh life of instant. How wonderful.

Perhaps that might be the reason why my Mother-In-Law (MIL) included this recipe for me.

Today's dish is as you already know from the title image; Sausage Rice Casserole!

This is my first official casserole dish and in fact, I only just learned what a casserole dish meant today... yet I am a food blogger..(clearing throuat)

Anywho, enough intro that was, so let's jump right into it!

WHAT YOU NEED :

Need I say more? It's chili. It's chili recipe from a Southern mom. 

HECK YES IT IS DELICIOUS!

After I made this this I actually had to look up this dish on wikipedia to better describe the dish to my Korean readers (yes, I have a Korean blog if you wish to check out), and I found out, that this dish is from Texas, not mexico somewhere. Chili is better known in Australia as Chili Con Carne, and apparently it means chilly with(con) meat(carne) in Spanish. 

Most recipes I found online used either instant chili seasoning or a ton of spices.

To my surprise, my mother-in-law's recipe only has five core ingredients

Ingredients : 

1 can Chili Beans

1 can Diced Tomatoes (missing in the picture below)

1 can Tomato Soup

1 med size Onion (Bell pepper too if you have)

1 lb Hamburger meat (ground beef)

She noted to add chili powder to taste and cumin if desired so I added 1 Tbs Chili Powder, but went without cumin since I did not have any. 

Now the fun part;
1. Brown your meat in an oiled pan. No need to drain the grease.

2. Chop up an onion and other veggie of your liking (Bell pepper highly recommended) in the meanwhile. 

3. Add all the ingredients to the pan you were browning your beef with and mix well. Also add chili powder and cumin if desired (I only added chili powder)

5. Simmer to marry flavour. I went for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. 

6.Completely optional, but I have fresh basil growing on the corner of my kitchen so I added them and they were SO GOOD with chili. I highly recommend this. If you were to add fresh ones, best to do it right before serving as an accent colour.

7. Now to serve it up, add cheddar cheese and crackers. Yum. 

No joke, I think this is the recipe I will pass down to my kids if I had any. This homemade chili was much better than the seasoning packet ones I had previously tried out and it only took 20min all together. No crockpot, no dozen of spices.

Seriously, try this out, you won't regret it. 

I am a Korean born, Australian made and most importantly, newly wed.

My husband, on the other hand, is a southern boy, born and raised in Tennessee, a place I have never heard of until the day I met him. I met my *now* husband in Seoul when he was stationed in Korea, serving US Air Force and I was vacationing after quitting my job in Sydney. Marrying an American was not quite my original intention of the trip to Korea but nonetheless, it happened and in the winter of 2014, I met my American mother-in-law for the first time.

I heard a lot about her from my fiancé by then. Mostly biased information, grumbling how typical Southern mom she was (at that time being, I would not even know what it meant to be 'Southern'), but one message was clear-She is a darn good cook.

Now let's get down to the business. What is this blog about?

It's about the first Christmas present I have received from my mother-in-law this year; a recipe book. A handwritten "Southern" recipe book, complied with recipes from past generations of my in-laws.

I know there are millions of cooking blogs out there and I do not mean to 'teach' my readers how to cook. The best shot I can get is 'mimicking' and that's what I intend to do. Just like Julie from the book&movie Julie and Julia - except, in my case, it would be a Korean daughter-in-law trying to follow recipes of Southern mother-in-law's.

If all goes smoothly, by next Christmas, I am hoping to surprise my new mother-in-law with a copy of photo recipe book, with all her (and many before her) handwritten recipes transformed into colourful dishes.

Now, there is one very critical thing you have to be aware. I know nothing about American soul food - I assume it is quite different to the Korean food I am used to. This means, often enough, I would not know what I am making and I would not guarantee the pictures you see on this blog is necessarily the true representation of the dish. But hey, ignorance is the bless they say. Unbiased means 100% honesty guarantee and I will try my best to criticize my own dish after my first attempt.

Please wish me good luck completing this new year's resolution / project 'in-laws 2015 xmas gift'.

xDaughterInLaw.