Cooking class with Jimin

We all know that I'm a little bit of a foodie... or at least I try to be. AJ and I have taken 2 cooking classes together in the states and it was such a great experience. When the opportunity came in Korea for me to get involved in a cooking class here, I  couldn't wait! Hez and I both went to the Galbi class. Galbi is meat that you eat when at Korean BBQ . She taught us how to make the marinade and what ingredients to look for at the grocery store. That's one of the major points of the cooking class is to help foreigners find and ingredients in the grocery store and to answer any questions that people have. Let me tell you, shopping in Korea can be one hell of a challenge. You can spend hours walking around in circles trying to figure out where the most simple thing is and never find it. Then you end up buying something and when you get home its not what you think it is! So pretty much half of the time its a guessing game. Thank goodness this sweet lady wants to teach us uneducated in Korean food foreigners a thing or too... plus she makes some killer kimchi.

Here's our class!

 

First they taught us how to bread and fry tofu.

 

Here is Jimin! She was such a sweet lady! I totally want to adopt her to be my Korean grandmother. Here she is showing us how to prepare the marinade for the meat. She already has the meat in the marinade for a day so she was now just showing us how to mix it up.

She also taught us how to make my favorite Korean side. At BBQ you get TONS of different sides to eat and my favorite is a salad that has onions and a red sauce on it. The sauce is a red pepper powder, oil and vinegar. Its so crazyyy delish!

In these next few pictures she is showing us how to make this red pepper soy bean paste that you eat in your lettuce wraps with the meat. I'm pretty sure its called samgatom ... or something like that. I'm really horrible at Korean. I did just send some of this paste to my mom and dad, if you want to try it ask them! :p You can put the paste on anything, I know a lot of people that absolutely love it on pretty much anything that they eat.

In this picture you can see the red pepper and the soy bean paste.

Then you add fresh garlic, scallions, salt and pepper and mix it up. I really enjoyed the fresh paste a lot more than when I eat the packaged stuff. It had so much flava, flav.

 

Here's the Galbi

 

Our sides, we had fresh sea weed in a soy sauce, Jimin's homemade kimchi, salad, fried tofu, lettuce (for making lettuce wraps) and the different sauces. JIMINS KIMCHI WAS SOOOO YUMMY! She was adamant that the reason her kimchi was so good was because she buys organic produce and high quality sardine paste for the kimchi... I had to agree because it was one of the first kimchi's that I kept going back for seconds.

 

Some of the group at dinner. Hez and I

We finished our meal with sweet rice cakes... they kinda remind me of a Korean rice crispy treat and green tea. :) What a great experience! I hope there are more cooking classes in the future and then ill be able to hare my Korean cooking skills when I get back home.