Cooking the Books

So, I don’t know what’s going to happen to this blog over the next few weeks, as a pandemic is causing shortages and grocery store chaos. Our local Trader Joe’s has had a line to get INTO the store that stretches around the parking lot, so I haven’t even bothered to try to go there.

When Chris and I were shopping for this meal, we stood in line at two different grocery stores for at least 30 minutes at each store. It was profoundly not fun. The good news: we were able to find everything we needed for Chris’s meal.

Chris chose to make Bulgogi, or Korean Marinated Beef for his meal from Dinner: Changing the Game, which is something that G and I were excited by, as we LOVE Bulgogi. Also, back when I was working in the city, I took Chris out to a fancy pants Korean lunch at a penthouse restaurant with amazing city views and excellent food.

It seemed like a fairly safe bet that all the kids would like the Bulgogi, so Chris made it on a night when we knew we’d all be home.

As with all of Melissa Clark’s recipes, it was well-written, straight forward and easy to make. Our only real complaint about it is that there were A LOT of ingredients, and a few specialty items that we had to search for like doenjang, which is a soy bean paste similar to miso, and gochujang, which is a chili paste, and one of my all-time favorite condiments.

After Chris added the marinade to the meat, he said that he’d wished he had marinated it the night before, so we decided to just leave it in the fridge and forage for dinner.

I anxiety-baked Pecorino Parsley Biscuits from a Smitten Kitchen recipe I googled (as we had lots of pecorino, parsley and scallions left over from the marinade.

The following night, Chris put together the sauce, which didn’t long.

Chopped up some condiments.

And sautéing the beef. He chose to use the wok, which made sense to me, but we realized this had been a bit of a mistake as the high sides of the wok had kept the juices from evaporating like they would have in a regular sautée pan, and the recipe called for cooking the meat until the juices evaporated. Ah well. Didn’t impact the flavor, and the meat was quite juicy.

The final product was incredible. All the kids liked it, a few of us went back for seconds, and there was only one serving left for the following day (which was gone by lunch).

All in all, the recipes from this book ranged from solid (my dish) to fabulous (Chris’s) and we’ll be making things from it again.

As we were cooking from this book, Melissa Clark released a new book, Dinner in French, which we will definitely be picking up at some point in the near future.