The Korean Version of Fried Rice

It's been a while since I posted. Class has started, and the workload is ridiculous--I get the feeling that the professors are trying to keep up the 51% dropout rate of the graduating Fashion Design (which is what I'm going for) students.

Fire Alarm Count: 23

Tonight, Esther cooked dinner for us. She made a popular Korean dish, essentially rice with mixed different vegetables, meat, and a spicy chili paste. It's a fairly simple and versatile dish conceptually but there are a lot of components and thusly a lot of ways it could go wrong. As she said, when the Chinese had fried rice, the Koreans had...



Bi Bim Bap

4 slices (1/8 pound) bulgogi beef
2 tbsp bulgogi marinade
you should be able to find the beef and marinade in an Asian market.
1/4 cup shiitake mushrooms, sliced
1 cup cooked short grain rice
it's important that it's short grain, because long grain rice doesn't have the correct texture for this dish.
1/2 cup romaine lettuce, chopped
1/4 cup soybean sprouts
1 tbsp Korean chili paste (add more or less to taste)
2 sheets 3x4" Korean nori seaweed
Korean, not Japanese (the kind you use for sushi), because Korean nori is crisper and tastier by itself.
1 egg

~Mix the beef and marinade in a bowl and refrigerate for 1 hour. Then remove it from the marinade and cut it into 1/2" slices.
~Heat some oil in a frying pan and stir-fry the beef with the mushrooms on medium-high heat until cooked.
~Blanch the soybean sprouts in boiling water for 30 seconds.
~Fry the egg sunny-side up.
~Arrange the bowl in this order if you want it to look pretty (if you don't care, you can probably throw it all in in any old order): rice, lettuce, sprouts, beef and mushrooms, egg, and chili paste. Shred the nori sheets and add it to the bowl.
~Mix it all together and eat!

This is for 1 person, but obviously you can double or triple (like we did) the recipe easily.

*This is a spicy dish! It's not the kind of spicy that smacks you in the face--rather, the chili paste tends to seem not very spicy when you first taste it, then creep up on you slowly. It's not very spicy (proof is that I could eat it without downing 3 glasses of water), but, y'know...just a word of caution.