Super easy (probably inauthentic) Korean food

To our cooking arsenal we’ve recently added a rice cooker and it’s revolutionary! Yum. I’ve heard stories from other adoptive parents that their children wouldn’t eat anything but rice once they arrived home. So we figured we’d better learn how to make good rice before Henry arrives home – something tells me our Minute Rice microwave version just wouldn’t cut it. 🙂

We made Korean sweet rice this weekend and it was divine! We served it with bulgogi wrapped in lettuce and it was so, so good. I will share with you the ‘recipe,’ although I don’t think you can even call it that. Super tasty and pretty quick to make. Although if you were serving it authentically, it would come with a multitude of side dishes. So this is the American version, and will serve about 4 people.

Ingredients:
1.5-2 pounds of sirloin steak
2/3 cup Bulgogi marinade (told you this was easy! We’re cheating on this part. Available at Asian grocery stores and maybe some hip grocery stores. If you can’t find it, the more Martha Stewart friendly version would be to make this: http://bbq.about.com/od/marinaderecipes/r/bl20209a.htm)
1/2 cup Rice wine (not rice wine vinegar, just rice wine. You could probably use Sake or a dry white wine)
3 tablespoons sugar
2-3 cups cooked Korean sweet rice (we used the rice cooker for this – just follow the directions in your rice cooker. It’s worth it to get the Korean sweet rice – much tastier than almost any other white rice I’ve had)
12-16 green leaf lettuce leaves

3-4 hours before meal time, cut your raw sirloin into narrow strips (about 1/2 an inch wide). Place in bowl. Add rice wine, sugar and 1/2 cup Bulgogi marinade, reserving the rest. Gently toss meat in mixture, ensuring all meat is properly covered, and cover bowl with plastic wrap. Refrigerate. (Could be done overnight) If you have a rice cooker with a delay timer, you could start the rice cooking to be done at the same time as the meat.

You can either grill the meat or cook it on the stove top in a bit of olive oil and some of the leftover marinade. If you grill it, brush strips with remaining marinade.

Because the strips are thin they will cook quickly. Cook until the sugar has caramelized on the outside – on the stove top, this took about 2-3 minutes per side.

Serve in a separate bowl along side rice and lettuce leaves for making your own wraps. Traditionally you would serve this with a Korean red chili paste mixture, but we forgot it at the Asian market so we served it with dabs of Sriracha and a drizzle of the Bulgogi marinade. Yum!