Last night I tried my hand at a Korean recipe for the first time, and it turned out great!

I stumbled across one of Maangchi’s delicious recipes and decided that, well, I had nothing better to do that day, so why not try cooking a nice dinner. This dish is called 궁중떡볶이, or Korean Royal court stir fried rice cakes. I was able to easily find all the ingredients at my local Korean market. In the meat department, I found some pre-marinated beef being sold at a special price, so I decided to purchase that instead of making the marinade myself, so I did cheat just a little. 😛 The recipe calls for only 3oz of beef, but I bought a pound and figured I could just add extra vegetables and have leftovers for lunch the next day.

Right as I was chopping up the vegetables, my sister came home from work. She was so surprised to see how I had taken over the entire kitchen! Since I had a lot of extra food, and she was curious about what I was making, I served a bowl for her as well. I was a little nervous about how she would react to the rice cakes since she’d never tried them before, but she ended up really liking it. And if I do say so myself, the meal was really delicious (*pats own back*). The beef was soft and tender, the vegetables blended well together, the rice cakes were soft and soaked up the flavor of the marinade, and I really liked the egg garnish as a nice contrast of flavors. I wish I had taken more pictures in order to make a more interesting blog post, but I barely managed to remember to take this one picture before I started stuffing my face. (I was hungry and it smelled good, I couldn’t wait much longer!)

You can check out the full recipe, complete with video and beautiful pictures, on Maangchi.com right here.

I am definitely not a whiz in the kitchen, so honestly, if I could make this, so can you! This is definitely something that I would like to make and eat again and again!