Kimchi Rice Vermicelli Soup 韩国泡菜米粉汤

Quick and Easy Korean Meals in 10 Minutes?

Previously, we covered the simple and easy way of making Korea's national dish, Kimchi. Once you have this ready-made Korean dish in your fridge, you can easily prepare various Korean meals anytime as you wish. For Korean families, kimchi seems to be a must in their food list. You can find one in nearly every fridge of a Korean home!

Often when kimchi has been stored in the fridge for a while, it will become more sour and pungent. This is because Kimchi will continue to ferment even under low temperature in the fridge. In such circumstances, instead of consuming it raw as a side dish you may consider incorporating it into cooking, upgrading it from a side dish to a main meal instead.

In this post I am going to share with you an idea of serving Korean main meal in less than 10 minutes! Yes, in fact this is one of my favourite lunch meals that I make at home during the office lunch hour.

Lately I like to rush back home (12 minutes away from office) for lunch. Even though Auntie Lan does prepare rice meal at home for hubby and son but usually during lunch hour, soup noodle is more of my preferred choice than rice meal. Since I only have an hour of lunch time, with 25 minutes taken up by traveling, how do I maximize the remaining 35 minutes to prepare a separate lunch meal ?

Well, the secret is quite simple. You just need to have all ingredients standby in the fridge and just throw them altogether in a saucepan for cooking.

For this Kimchi Noodle Soup ( Kimchi  menu, simply add kimchi to a cup of boiling water or stocks, season to taste and throw in your choice of noodle ( I used rice vermicelli)! As simple as 1, 2, 3 and in 10 minutes time you get to enjoy a bowl of delicious Kimchi Noodle Soup!

 

You can add more flavor to this Kimchi Noodle soup by adding any side ingredients such as tofu, fish balls or meat balls, fish cake etc. as desired. You can also garnish it with spring onion or Korea seasoned and roasted dried seaweeds ( Gim, which I bought from Korea) to your liking.

 

The following is my simple Kimchi Noodle Soup I made for my lunch today!

Hmmmmm!!! Mash eet da!! Yummy!

Since the Kimchi we made was mildly hot, you can see the soup was clearer than what you can expect from the famous Korean Shin Ramyun instant noodle soup which is bloody red and hot!

In less than 10 minutes, here is the empty bowl!

After enjoying this nutritious, warm, and satisfying noodle soup, I still have another 15 minutes rest time before heading back to work

Simplified Kimchi 韩国泡菜

Na Du Se Kimchi! 

I must say Kdrama not only successfully promoted Korea tourism worldwide; even the Korean food culture has now slowly blended into our daily cooking.

Today in this blog, follow up on my coverage of my Korea trip, I would like to introduce a simple way of making Kimchi. Kimchi is widely known as one of Korean famous signature foods. It is also of my favorite Korean foods.

During our Seoul and JeJu trip, we noticed nearly every meals we had regardless whether rice, noodle, BBQ or steamboat, various banchan or side dishes would be served along too. Amongst these banchan, Kimchi which regards as Korean National dish is most often served. 

Kimchi is a spicy, fermented pickled vegetable with variety of seasonings. The main vegetable used for this dish is napa/long cabbage and its key seasoning is the Korean red chili powder flakes and the common natural ferment agents comprising of fruit with citric acid such as ginger, apple and pear.  
The traditional Kimchi making is very tedious and time consuming with a long fermentation process. Shown here is a simplified version, introduced by Wai. She initially found this recipe on the Internet but at the end it was her Indonesia maid, who has mastered the skill of the Kimchi making process instead.

3 weeks ago, she invited us to her house to have our Korea photos sharing cum kimchi making session. I took the opportunity to record down the whole process. Shared below is the Simplified Kimchi Making video.

Here in Malaysia, it is not cheap to buy Kimchi over the counters. Furthermore, we will never know what sort of added preservatives are in it. This Kimchi making process is simpler than I expected. It probably can’t get any easier than this; no excuse not to try eh?

Korea eat, shop and play

Annyeonghaseyo! Hello to all!

In recent years, the influence of Korean drama (Kdrama) and Kpop created strong Korean wave swept across all over Asia especially in the South East Asia. Being one of the Kdrama followers myself, I must admit I have been longing to visit Korea after watching those dramas.

However, I failed to convince HB to include this country in our travel destinations, as he regarded Korea as merely shopping heaven for ladies, crowded high tech cities with little surprises and nothing much for an adventure seeker. Hence, I had to find other companions to go with.

Finally at the end of April 2014, I managed to gather 2 of my 30+ years’ primary schoolmates Wai and Joyce to join me. With the addition of another close friend of Joyce, LI, we formed the Malaysia A4 Ajumma (Auntie) team. Instead of going with a travel agent, we decided to brave ourselves for an 8 days 7 nights DIY tour to Seoul and Jeju.

Being the main organizer of the team, I started to plan and book air tickets since last year. I was pleased that it was so easy to locate so many useful and detailed Korea DIY travel sites via internet such as Tripadvisor.com and by just reading thru them and I had no problem to come up with our own itineraries. Hostel booking was also hassle free by referring to the famous Booking.com.

I enjoyed the trip very much. However, traveling on our own in Seoul by using public transport, some intensive walking was unavoidable. Even for myself, who was more used to running long distances among the 4 of us, found the walking trips we had in Seoul strenuous, not to mention for the other 3 Ajumma members, who were not as sporty and were so used to travel with travel agencies with fancy tour bus to hop on and off throughout the entire traveling period, these walks were overly taxing.

Every night, when we returned to the hostel, our calf muscles were so sore. Luckily LI brought muscle pain relief gel and it was the life savior to us! I guess, after this trip if I were to organize another DIY tour they would not dare to join me again hahaha……

After completing the tour, I have to concur Korea is one of the safest countries to travel on your own even if you do not speak their language. Tourist information and directions are easily available especially in big cities like Seoul, Busan and Jeju Island.

What follow were some of the highlights of our trip:

The ancient side of Seoul : Palaces and Hanok village  

The urban side of Seoul

Spring in Seoul:
  

The Nature side of South Korea: Jeju Island

Following were the food we devoured during our trip in Seoul and Jeju.

Seoul Signature dish : Ginseng Chicken Soup

Food in Gwangjang Market, one of Korea's largest traditional markets:

Food in Insadong shopping area:

Rice and Noodles set:






Famous Namsan market Noodle:

Seoul Street food:


Seoul fast food


Beverages:


I had to say that throughout the trip, the food we had in Jeju was the best especially the Abalone seafood.

I had to give credit to our Taxi driver cum guide we chartered in Jeju Island, who brought us to local restaurants patronized by the locals to taste the authentic local delicacies rather than the other restaurants catered to foreigners and tourists traveling in packaged tour with travel agencies.

Jeju Abalone Seafood Steamboat




Jeju BBQ Black pig


Jeju famous Sister Noodle house


Check out also the video clip of the Seoul Night Food at Pojangmacha, small tented street food stalls.

Seoul Night Food at Pojangmacha