Hello! This is Senior! Junior didn’t feel like cooking today, and though cruising the internet I got inspired to make my ex-boyfriend’s mom’s meatloaf: Upside-Down Meatloaf. Shit is tasty.
This is a definite Michigan food as it is smothered in sugar and ketchup and has absolutely no spices whatsoever. As such, it is wonderful and delicious.
Stuff you need:
Loaf pan (9 inch-ish)
Tin foil
Ingredients:
Brown sugar
Ketchup
2 lb lean ground beef (sirloin is preferable)
Onion
2 eggs
½ cup bread crumbs
½ cup milk
Salt
What do:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Prepare your loaf pan by lining it with a good amount of tin foil. This loaf is sticky, and it will be a lot less of a pain to clean up if the pan is lined with foil.
Once it’s lined, dump in an amount of brown sugar which will basically cover the bottom of the pan. The exact amount doesn’t matter much, since it’ll all soak into the meat anyway, so however much or little sugar you’d like to add is fine.
Now that the sugar is in, cover the sugar with ketchup. Again, however much you’d like to put is probably just fine. I dotted it on so it was entirely covered, but some sugar was still visible.
Mix the meat, onion, eggs, milk, breadcrumbs, ½ cup of ketchup and a bit of salt in a big bowl. I prefer to mix meatloaf with my hands because there is less chance of splatter and it mixes evenly. It is pretty cold though, so if your hand cramps up just pull it out for a second. If you are creeped out by sticking your hand in a bowl of raw meat and eggs, a spoon with a largely downward smashing motion works too.
Once it’s mixed well (even distribution of onions), shape it into a rounded oblong shape that sort of matches the pan. Pick it up and plop it into the pan with the ketchup and sugar in the bottom. The less it has to be moved around once it’s in the pan, the better. It will disrupt the sugar layer if it is adjusted too much.
Put it in the oven and bake for 1 hour. It gets pretty dark on top, and sometimes gets crispy edges, but it shouldn’t burn.
Done!
I suppose since it’s based on the idea of a pineapple upside-down cake, that it should probably be flipped over and served “right-side up”, but I prefer to just let it stew in its own sugary juices in the pan as it is slowly demolished as leftovers.
Serve with even more ketchup, and maybe some mashed potatoes or something. Since it takes an hour to cook there’s a lot of time for making side items.
So I threatened to make Dutch food a while back and I haven’t delivered on that. And I’m going to continue to not deliver on that with this recipe! Both sides of my family are very recently off the boat, so I grew up being very aware of my heritage. Usually the food of the nations my family is from: Dutch on my father’s side, and Irish on my mother’s.
Shepherd’s Pie is a very familiar Irish dish in the States. Sometimes it’s called Cottage Pie, which is generally what the American version of this dish is. Fun factoid about Irish food for you, Shepherd’s Pie and Cottage Pie are two different dishes. It’s only Shepard’s Pie when you use lamb or mutton.
Which is exactly what I did:
THE FILLING
1.5 lbs Lamb (beef or beef and lamb mixture can be used - but then you have to stop calling it Shepherd’s Pie, you feeb)
1 cup chopped carrots
1 cup peas
1 small onion
2 large cloves of garlic
4 Tbs Worcestershire Sauce
3 Tbs Red Wine
Salt
Pepper
First you’ll want to wilt and brown your onion and garlic. Chop them up and put them in a pot with a bit of Olive Oil and brown away. Once the onions reach your desired cooking level (if I haven’t already established that if onions are involved in a recipe - I will caramelize them - I have now), put in your meat of choice. Make sure as you brown the meat, you break it up into very fine pieces. You want your vegetables and meat chunks to roughly be the same size.
As for the vegetables in the filling, I used frozen. You can certainly use fresh but considering I had huge bags of the stuff just sitting around, I was going to use them. But because they are frozen that means there’s going to be a lot of unwanted extra liquid floating around in our filling and we don’t want that. So let the frozen vegetables come to room temperature and squeeze the water out of them (this mostly just applies to the carrots - the hooligans), chop the sliced carrots into small pieces and add them to the meat and onions to cook up. If you find there’s still too much liquid in the filling, simply push all the meat to one side of the pan and tilt the pan to the opposite direction. Then, taking a paper towel, soak up the liquid pooling at the side of the pan.
This is when you add the rest of the listed ingredients for the filling: Worcestershire Sauce, Red Wine, Salt and Pepper. Salt and pepper to taste, remember that Worcestershire sauce is salty as is, and you might not need anything at all. Let the filling continue to cook over medium/low heat until the alcohol evaporates out.
THE MASH
An amount of potatoes (it’s best to use an equal ratio of taters to meat)
3 Tbs Butter
1/4 cup Milk
1/4 cup Sour Cream
Lightly salt a pot of water and bring it to a boil Peel and chop the potatoes. Put potatoes in boiling water. Cook until done. Mashed potatoes are not rocket surgery. Once your taters are cooked, drained and smashed, add the butter, milk and sour cream and mix it up. You have tasty taters.
Preheat an oven for 400 degrees, and layer the filling and the potatoes in a casserole dish. Cook in the oven for about 15 minutes.
Look it’s food!
Happy Easter!
Whether you celebrate in the strictest religious sense or you just like chocolate bunnies, I hope you have a lovely day!
Me? I made occultist Easter eggs. Because I am having a love affair with irony.
Now I don’t eat eggs due to some broken parts inside, they can’t handle the cholesterol in the yolks, but my roommate on the other hand loves eggs. And I wanted to make some Easter eggs that wouldn’t go to waste, but because I’m a crazy person I wouldn’t settle for just any old solid colored eggs. I had to make them fancy.
You too can have fancy eggs! It’s not hard at all, and you make them with stuff you probably already have in your house.
To hard boil an egg (which is one of those things that is easy to do but somehow seems really scary to do), you just need to put your eggs in a pot of cold, salted water, place them on the stove and heat until boiling. Once the water boils, let it boil for 1-2 minutes, then turn off your stove but keep the pot on the burner. Just plop a lid on there and let it sit on the stove for 12-15 minutes and you’ve got yourself some eggs!
To make egg dye, just add a teaspoon of vinegar (apple cider, white, rice, anything you’ve got will do just fine) to 1 cup of hot tap water and color with food coloring.
To make the stencils all I did was take regular old masking tape which I cut with an exacto knife to the shapes I wanted and stuck it to the egg. I used a burnishing tool to make sure they were good and stuck on there and the dye wouldn’t leak under. Then put your eggs into the dye and let them sit until you get the color you want. Dry your eggs and peel off the tape and ta-da! Fancy eggs.
So once again, back to wanting Asian food. So we had a package of rice noodles in the cabinet and there are only a few things to make with those. It was a real toss up between Pho and Bee Thai Bak. So I met in the middle. Thus, once again, making this a totally unauthentic recipe that pulls from a bunch of different dishes.
THE BROTH
1 3/4 cup Chicken Broth
1 1/2 cup Water
1/4 tsp chilli paste
1 clove garlic
1/4 tsp ginger
1 tsp soy sauce
1/2 tsp worshishire sauce
White Pepper to taste
THE VEGETABURRS
Cabbage
Mushrooms
Green Onion
OTHER STUFF
Shrimp
Fish Cake or Fish Balls [Obviously, optional. Not everyone has weird shit in their fridge like I do]
First thing’s first, make your broth. Pour all the ingredients into a pot and bring to a boil. Once it’s reached a rolling boil for 1-2 minutes strain the broth. Easiest way to do this is to take a colander, line it with paper towel, and pour the broth through it. You’ll get all the rogue garlic and ginger shreds with ease, and (if you used bouillon cubes like I did - any chunks that didn’t dissolve) then pour that right back into the pot and keep it on the stove on low while you make the noodles. Rice noodles are like any other kind of noodle, just boil until done.
While the noodles are cooking, chop the cabbage, mushrooms and green onion. Toss them all in and cook until the cabbage is soft. Then, add the shrimps! I’m cheap and lazy and used precooked - if you don’t want to use precooked, then don’t. Just make sure they’re cooked by the time you put them into your broth. Slice the fish cake and toss them in too. Once everything is thoroughly heated, toss the noodles into the broth and mix well!
Top it off with some white pepper and serve. You can always add more soy sauce or chili paste if you like, the broth is really super mild so if you’re looking for something with some more kick to it, do something about it.
So nuricurry requested I make her something with ground beef (what do you think this is, Runny’s channel, we don’t work that way here) a good while ago. But I accidentally deleted the ask. So I asked if she wouldn’t mind resubmitting. Don’t worry followers, the hostility is expected and encouraged.
So that being said I thought it was time to step away from my Asian-esque (I almost did my recipe for steamed buns. But perhaps another time.) last few entries and do something from another nation entirely! This time, some sticks to your ribs Russian tastyness: Beef Stroganoff.
THE MEATS
1 pound lean ground beef (the recipe traditionally calls for tenderloin or sirloin. But do you know how expensive that stuff is? And do you know how poor I am?)
THE VETGETABURRS
1 medium onion
1 package of sliced mushrooms
1 clove of garlic
OTHER STUFF YOU NEED
3 Tbs unsalted butter
1 cup Sour Cream
Tarragon
Nutmeg
Salt & Pepper
First thing’s first. Melt that 3 tablespoons of butter in a pan. We’re starting out the Paula Dean way. Obviously you can replace the butter with oil of your choice, you could even use less butter if you wanted to BUT WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO? Next, break up your meat into the pan and brown that stuff. You want to make sure your pan is hot enough to brown the meat, but not too hot as to burn the butter. I kept mine just under medium. I had to do two batches because I really suck and I don’t have any sense of spatial awareness and used a pan that was way too small. So that being said:
PROTIP: Use a really big pan for this.
Once your meats are cooked (you can leave them a BIT pink if you’d like, the meat will cook more in the sauce. Since this dish is usually meant to be made with a significantly more tender cut of meat you don’t want to over cook your ground beef) take them out of the pan and set them aside, but don’t drain the pan. You should have some beef fat and butter still in the pan. KEEP IT. KEEP IT AND USE IT’S POWERS. By roughing dicing your onion and mincing the garlic and putting both of those things in the pan. Caramelize those onions. Don’t know how? Easy. Check out this recipe I posted earlier.
Once your onions have reached a point of supreme deliciousness, toss in your mushrooms. Mix them up well so the onions, garlic and whatever is left of the meats/butter liquids soak into the mushrooms (there shouldn’t be too much left, much of it will evaporate or be absorbed by the onions). Also put in 1/2 teaspoon of tarragon and 1/8 teaspoon of nutmeg. Mix and cook until the mushrooms are soft. Once you reach this point add your cup of sour cream. And mix some more. But DO NOT bring this to a boil or let it bubble, if you do the sour cream will curdle and it’ll be gross. Then, throw your meat in and mix some more.
Now serve on noodles! Egg noodles are best, but I didn’t have any. So I just used rotini. Rice, I also hear, is good. But eff that. Noodles are the way to go. And enjoy!
HOPE THAT IS SUFFICIENT ENOUGH FOR YOU, NURI.
So I quit my job because I got a better one and there was need for celebration. And you know what I call celebrating? Chilli and Supernatural. And that was exactly what I did that day.
Chilli is an awesome food to make a crapload of because it freezes well and you can have leftovers for the rest of your life. It has multiple applications, you can just eat it like a bowl of chilli, slap some fritos and cheese on there and you have frito pie, put it on a hot dog, put it on nachos! All sorts of stuff.
But if there’s one thing I learned about chilli, it’s that you can make or break it with the spices. Spices are what DEFINES chilli. Because I tried it once, and I just put all the ingredients into a pot and called it chilli AND IT WAS NOT CHILLI. It tasted like crap. It was just a bunch of bland beans in some sauce and that is NOT CHILLI. Spices are very important.
THE INGREDIENTS
- 1 pound lean ground beef
- 1 can of pinto beans
- 1 can of black beans
- 1 can of kidney beans
- 1 can of stewed tomatoes (the kind in my cabinet had little chillies in them, which is pretty awesome but also entirely optional)
- tomato juice (spicy V8 is also really good)
- 1 small onion
- 2 cloves garlic
THE SPICES (IN ORDER OF IMPORTANCE)
- Ground Cumin
- Black Pepper
- Bay Leaf
- Granulated Garlic
- Chilli Powder
- Cayenne Powder
NOTE: All of these spices are to taste, but I found that Cumin is the key. Cumin makes chilli taste like Chilli.
So first you want to chop your onions and garlic into bitty pieces and brown them over medium heat - add a bit of olive oil to the pan to help them not turn into crunchy burnt nuggets. Once they get fragrant, and sweat it out a bit, put in your ground beef. I find it helpful to tear the beef into chunks, even though it’s already ground. If you put the whole loaf into there the outsides will brown and make it pretty hard for the inside to cook properly. So if you increase the surface area (MATH) you’ll have more surfaces to cook, meaning evenly cooked meats. That’s how math works, right? Be sure to drain the meat periodically, even though you have lean ground beef you’re still going to get a lot of fat pooling up in the bottom, so just use a paper towel to soak up the excess fat. You don’t want to leave it in your chilli because it’ll just make it greasy and will separate.
While your beefs are cooking, open up that can of stewed tomatoes and cut them up. Yank them suckers right out of their can and cut them into pieces. Stewed tomatoes usually break apart in the can, but a lot of times you’ll have whole tomatoes floating around in there. If you like your chilli with a greater tomato to bean ratio, you can use another can. I prefer my chilli to be fart inducing. Add your tomatoes to the pot. Cook the beef until it’s pink (it’s alright if it’s not totally cooked at this point, but you want the majority of the cooking to be done before you add anything else). Then, open all three cans of beans and pour them into a colander, you can to get the nasty bean juice out of there. Rinse the beans gently and add them to the pot as well. Mix up your chilli.
This is where the tomato juice comes in. You’ll notice that your chilli isn’t very chilli like at this point. I know some people prefer their chilli to be more of a stew, so maybe you don’t need any of the juice at all, but on the other hand, some people like their chilli more like a soup. I like mine as a nice happy medium. I didn’t measure how much juice I added, but if I had to guess I’d say about 2 cups. Add as much as makes you happy and your chilli tasty.
And then season to taste! That’s all there is to it, really. When seasoning, be sure to use a light hand. You can always add more, but don’t start dumping seasonings in all willy nilly because that’s how you make food taste like crap. YOU DON’T WANT YOUR FOOD TO TASTE LIKE CRAP.
Now put a lid on your chilli and let it simmer for about 20 minutes. This will help the beef finish cooking if you left it a little too rare and evenly cook the spices and heat all the ingredients. Then serve! Add cheese or chips or sour cream or whatever you like on your chilli and enjoy!
So remember what I said about Asian-esque food? Welcome to more of that. One day I’ll cook Dutch food and no one will want to eat it. BUT I’LL DO IT.
I digress. My roommate and I recently were blessed with an Asian market opening down the street. We love Asian markets. I love seeing the different packaging, and seeing what kinds of food other cultures eat regularly - I just think it’s so interesting. What flavors are popular to other cultures, what’s common, what their cheap and easy snacks are. I don’t know, I think it’s pretty interesting. Don’t make fun of my hobbies.
I digress again, the nice thing about most Asian markets is that they sell their goods for cheaper than the average Walmart of Publix, and they sell things that neither of those chains have. Such as candied potato strips (tastes like a sugary, wet, french fry - all in all, not too bad), fresh fish and produce and the 75 cent package of tempura flour that made me decide that I was going to tempura everything in our kitchen.
Before we get to the inexact science of dumping food into hot oil:
THE SAUCE:
- 1/3 cup of Dashi Stock (Don’t have that? Don’t know what it is? Use vegetable stock. It’s all good.)
- 2 Tbs Soy Sauce
- 1 tsp Sake
- 1 Tbs Sugar
Mix the Dashi stock and sake in a pot and bring to a boil to get the alcohol out. Unless you like hangover with your shrimps. Once they’re boiling, add the soy sauce and sugar. TA-DA. Tasty tempura sauce. You could add ginger or garlic or oyster sauce or whatever you like.
Next you want to prepare your tempura batter. It’s not hard, just be sure to use equal parts flour and water. I measured out the flour into a bowl, found there to be a cup of flour, and then added a cup of water. BE SURE TO USE COLD WATER. IT’S IMPORTANT. Mix well, trying to get the lumps out without mixing TOO much. You must achieve tempura serenity.
If you’re going to fry any meat (like fish and shrimp, like we did) add a bit of salt and sake on top of the meat before frying. Sprinkle whatever you want to fry with extra tempura flour, this helps the batter stick to the ingredients.
Heat your vegetable oil until it’s shimmering, check to see if it’s hot enough by putting a bit of tempura batter into the oil to see if it bubbles and rises. And this is important, don’t just jack your stove up to high and think that’s going to cook your food into anything besides a blackened clump of carbon. Because it’s not. I kept my stove set to about medium the whole time, I’m sure there’s a perfect temperature you should heat your oil too but that’s implying I have a kitchen thermometer and can be bothered to do things correctly. If your oil is too hot and your drops of batter turn into little charred rat poos, honestly, your best bet is to take your oil outside and let it cool down. This will take a few minutes, but you’re going to ruin and waste food if you try to put anything in the oil that’s too hot.
Once your oil is properly hot, be sure to crack a window and close the doors of your apartment because it’s about to smell like saturated fat up in here. Carefully place your items into the oil. Don’t crowd the pot, otherwise it won’t cook evenly. Wait until everything floats and is golden brown.
You have successfully fried food. We fried approximately a mountain. Left overs forever. (If you were wondering, that pile contains green beans, onions, sweet potato, tilapia and shrimp. We’re gunna need a bigger boat.)
You can put it on rice, or on noodles, or just enjoy your fried everything plain. DO IT UP.
So here’s a story: My roommate and I went to college across the street from this Restaurant called Udon Sushi Bakery. It was owned by a really fabulous Korean family who made every flavor of bubble tea you could ever imagine (no seriously, name something, they probably had it) and lit the fuse of my serious Kalbee addiction. They had a limited menu, but there was nothing on that menu that wasn’t the greatest food you’ve ever been served. We’d be sitting on the toilet chairs at the bar (they were chairs, but they were also toilets. It’s very complicated.) sucking up cauldrons of soup nearly every weekend.
So we went through college with an ever present, easily accessible source of delicious, home cooked, Asian cuisine. What college student doesn’t live off some form of Asian food, be it take out or the 15 cent ramen noodles? We were just spoiled. Really really spoiled.
Now because of this, my roommate and I frequently desire quality Asian dishes. Also because we are weeaboos. So a lot of my recent attempts to cook new things have been Asian-esque. Just enough of that certain flavor to scratch the food itch. This combination I came up with is not, by any stretch of the imagination, authentic. But I’ll be damned if it wasn’t tasty.
Not only is this recipe just that, but also a really good way to kill leftovers.
THE SAUCE:
- 1/4 cup soy sauce
- 3/4 cup water
- 1/2 teaspoon grated ginger (powdered ginger is also fine. I GUESS)
- 1/4 teaspoon grated garlic (powdered garlic is fine, if you like making your mother cry)
- 3 tablespoons brown sugar
- honey to taste
- 2 tablespoons corn starch
- 1/4 cup cold water
Dissolve the corn starch in the cold water and set aside until I tell you to come back for it.
Mix everything else over medium heat in a sauce pan until the honey and brown sugar are completely dissolved. Once dissolved, slowly add the starch until you reach the desired thickness.
PROTIP: This is a lot like making gravy, and don’t tell me you haven’t made gravy before. Do I have to explain everything to you? Yes? Fine. Anyway, you need to add the starch and water VERY slowly, stirring constantly until the sauce starts bubbling. The starch won’t start thickening up the sauce until you reach a certain temperature. Don’t worry if you add too much starch, you can always water it down again.
THE MEATS:
- 1 pork loin (pork, thankfully, in my area is cheap. While a loin is a bit pricer, you get a lot of meat out of it. My roommate and I usually stretch it for about a week and a half. Leftovers are good. Embrace them.)
Ready for this? This is the easiest way to make pork. Do you have a crock pot? No? Get one. Seriously, my poor ass has a crock pot, you need a crock pot. You can put food in it and walk away from it and then a few hours later have totally different food. It’s magic. Invest in a crock pot.
Put the pork in the crock pot and cover with water entirely. Set your crock pot to low and walk away. Did you plug it in? Make sure you plugged it in. Be sure the water level stays constant and let it cook until the inside of the meat is white. Drain out the water and shred the pork. You can make anything you want with the pork, we made about half of it into barbecue pork, and then about a quarter of the leftovers into this particular dish. But make as much or as little as you want. You’ve got plenty to work with. You’ll want to leave your pork overnight. What I usually do is make the pork before I go to bed, and then when my roommate gets up to go to work, she’ll turn the crock pot off, shred the meat and throw it in the fridge.
THE VEGETABURRS:
- 1 medium sized onion (you can use as many onions as you want. Go nuts. Use 5 onions, I don’t care - just so long as the amount of onion you have is proportional to the amount of meat you want to use)
Now here’s a basic cooking skill that everyone should have: caramelizing onions. I mean, some people like smelly crunchy raw onions, and good for them, but they’re wrong. Because that is the most inferior state an onion can be in. Caramelized onions take some time but it’s WORTH IT.
First you want to chop your onion, you don’t want the pieces to be TOO small, as they will reduce drastically in size as you cook, but you don’t want them to be too big either. Be sure to separate all the layers to maximize onion chunks. Add some olive oil into a pan, as well as a chunk of unsalted butter. If you like lots of butter, add a bunch of butter, Paula Dean. I just put the average “You would find this on top of a stack of pancakes” sized pat in my pan. Turn your stove to medium/high heat and let the butter melt and then toss those onions in. Make sure they all get coated in butter and oil.
It’s at this point I like to add a quarter teaspoon of sugar. It sort of speeds up the processes (maybe? I don’t know, I always feel like it does. Anyway, it’s tasty.) Now you play the waiting game. Lower the heat on your stove, put a lid on your onions and leave them alone for a while. Check on them to push them around a bit, making sure nothing gets burnt. There is, in fact, a difference between caramelized onions and burnt onions. If you onions are looking a bit dry, add a splash of water to help them out. It’s okay, you don’t want crunchy dehydrated onions.
Cook until your onions are a rich brown color. And look, ta-da, you have caramelized onions! At this point you can throw you shredded pork into the pan with them and give them a good mix. Heat up your pork in the pan if you just pulled it out of the fridge like I did. Then pour your sauce all over your onions and meat and mix well - you don’t have to use all of it, do what you want. Heat that up a bit more too and then ta-da! You have manry pork and onions!
And like always, slap that on some rice, add some green onions and vegetarian pork floss (I don’t even know what that is but there’s a huge container of it in my kitchen cabinets and I’m going to use it, damnit) and you’ve got yourself a meal.
Do you ever think to yourself “Oh good goddamn I’d like some Kalbee for dinner.”? If you’re anything like me, you answered this with “only every day of my life” only to realize that you live in a swamp and that’s just not going to happen because you’ve been to that Japanese restaurant across the street and you’ve seen the way they pimp out that gross mayonnaise sauce and Kalbee isn’t even Japanese so you’re pretty much boned.
So on this particular day my urge to fangorious devour a plate full of hacked up ribs was particularly strong, BUT OH NO. I didn’t have beef! And ribs are expensive! And I don’t even know how to make Kalbee! The best I had under my belt was a pretty good recipe for teriyaki sauce and meat buns. BUT FEAR NOT WEARY TRAVELER! That was apparently all I needed to make successful Kalbee (obviously with a few modifications).
THE MEATS:
- 2 beef or pork cube steaks [do you know how cheap cube steak is? It’s so cheap. Two of them for 3 dollars? Do you know how much money ribs are? Way too much money is the answer.]
THE SAUCE:
- 1/4 cup Soy Sauce [you can use low sodium if you want, don’t let me tell you how to live your life]
- 1 tsp Sake [for deliciously drunk meats, but entirely optional]
- 1 1/2 tsp grated ginger
- 3 cloves of garlic
- 1 Tbs brown sugar [honey is also fine]
- Half an apple
THE VEGETABURRS:
- Mushrooms of your choice [I used white button mushrooms, you could use shiitake mushrooms if you’re better than the rest of us or something]
- Green onions
OTHER STUFF YOU NEED:
- Corn starch
- Sesame Oil
First thing’s first! The night before you want to eat your delicious Kalbee take your cube steak and poke MORE holes in it. It’s already perforated, but it’s a good idea to try to break up some of the fat that’s in the steak, it’ll make your life a little easier before you cook. Then, mix the soy sauce, sake, brown sugar and grated ginger together in a quart size plastic ziploc bag. Be sure to peel your three cloves of garlic, cut off the nasty root end and then CRUSH THE CRAP OUT OF THEM. I just take the back of my knife and pound on it for a while. Throw them in the bag too.
Then peel your half an apple (take out the core and seeds too) and grate it (I use a fine cheese grater, that does the trick), give the other half to your roommate who’s on the floor watching Supernatural.
I know what you’re thinking, why can’t I use apple sauce? Because apples are cheaper than apple sauce, and apple sauce is full of sugar and artificial sweetner and that doesn’t a delicious Kalbee make.
Put your apple goop in the bag as well as the meat. Moosh the bag around a bit so all the sauce covers the meat. If you want to cook your steaks whole, don’t moosh TOO much. I managed to pulverize mine because I couldn’t stop poking at it (story of my life) so I ended up making little meat nuggets instead.
Leave your bag of meat and goop in the fridge for at least 4 hours. You can leave it in longer, I’m not your mother, I can’t tell you what to do.
After you meats have had time to sit for a while, preheat a pan with some sesame oil. Before adding anything to the pan, be sure to test if it’s hot enough. You don’t know how to do that? What’s wrong with you? Put a drop of water in the oil and see if it explodes in your face! No, really. That’s how you do it. Take a few steps back. Seriously.
If you want to cook your steaks whole, go ahead and pull them out of the bag and put them into the pan - pick out the crushed cloves of garlic before you do. Then cook until done, flipping every few minutes and keeping a lid over the meat between flips.
If you want to make them into little meatballs like I did, be sure to tear the meat from the fat and smoosh it up a bit so you get kind of a sticky paste. Add a sprinkle of corn starch (you really don’t need much) and chopped green onions and mix well. Take those crushed garlic cloves that are floating around in the bag and chop them into itty bitty pieces and throw them back into the meat goo. Form into meatballs and cook in the same manner as the steaks. You don’t want to cook it all at once, only do 6 or 7 at a time. Wipe the bottom of the pan off with a paper towel between batches, unless you like burnt crap in your food, I’m not going to judge. Also add more oil as needed between batches.
To cook the mushrooms, leave the pan scrapings from your meat, add oil and a quarter cup of soy sauce and heat until it bubbles to loosen up the bits at the bottom of the pan. Throw in chopped mushrooms and coat in the sauce, then add a quarter cup of water, put a lid on the pan and leave it alone until it starts to boil. Your mushrooms are done!
Now slap that crap on some rice with some green onions and you’ve got some tasty eats!
First things first here.
I have a spice rack.
I don’t think you understand how important this is.
It means I have more room for cups. I can have more cups.
