As expected, my Lunar New Year holiday was filled with mouth-watering homemade food. My mom is an amazing cook and I'm always thankful to her for cooking veg meals whenever I visit home. In fact, my parents both eat mostly vegan when I'm around. :)
The following are some photos of the yummy comfort foods I had over the course of 2 days. Behold and drool:
For one meal, my mom and I baked this bbq-style tofu. Here's the recipe for the sauce, with estimated measurements:
2 Tbs gochujang (Korean red pepper paste)
1 Tbs brown rice syrup
1 Tbs oil
1 Tbs soysauce
1-2 cloves finely chopped garlic
1 tsp sugar
1/4 cup finely chopped scallions to sprinkle on top
Method: First, mix all the sauce ingredients together (minus the scallions) in a small bowl. Then cut up a block of firm tofu and place them on a baking sheet. Cover the tofu with half of the sauce mixture, then place them in the broiler oven for about 10 minutes. Take them out and spread the rest of the sauce on top and sprinkle the chopped scallions. Pop them back in the oven for about another 10 minutes. Voila.
Here are two different kinds of 'namul' banchan (side dishes) we made. Spinach and radish.
Some sweet red kidney beans for a side dish. I could eat this by itself and call it a meal. So delicious. I'll get the recipe from my mom soon!
We also had a batch of leftover savory pumpkin pancakes that my mom had cooked up the day before. They were really awesome, dipped in a little soysauce.
We had bibimbab for one meal, using the leftover spinach and radish banchans, and some sauteed carrots/onions, fresh perilla leaves and lettuce, and a dollop of gochujang. All the veggies are covering up the rice underneath!
Ofcourse, we had to have ddeok-guk for one of our meals. Notice, there are no chunks of meat floating around, or egg slices placed on top for garnish, which is typical of ddeok-guk. :) In the background are beansprout banchan and leftover tofu from the other day. I hope all of youz also ate a gigantic bowl of ddeok-guk, so that you could deliciously and gracefully add another year to your age!
Last but not least, here is a mah-velous salad made with fresh cabbage and lettuce.
Here's the salad assembled on my plate with some sweet potato and kidney beans. Yum.