Like many people, I suffer the regular ebb and flow of creativity and productivity in life, and in particular when figuring out what to make for dinner. Sometimes ideas possess me, and other times I'm desperate to just make something, anything that we can all eat and enjoy. We all have our staple, go-to dishes to fall back on, but the struggle is to avoid falling back on them too often.
Enter the world of bibimbap. Essentially it's mixed vegetables on rice, but you can "dress it up or down" as your time/energy/creativity fit. Apparently (although I speak no Korean) "bibim" means mix and "bap" is for rice. More specifically, the vegetables are in the form of namool, which are different salad-ish dishes. For example, common namool could include soy bean sprouts blanched and seasoned with sesame oil, braised fiddleheads (bracken fern), pickled daikon radish, or shredded wakame (young kelp) seaweed. At it's most basic, bibimbap is assembled by topping a bowl of hot rice with various namool and a bit of kochu jang (Korean hot pepper paste) and then mixed all together.
Admittedly, preparing a five or six different vegetable dishes for the purpose of mixing them together is not necessarily a quick and easy task, so why is this supposed to be an easy dinner solution? Because of Kim's Mart (519 E Broadway) that's why. For $5.99 the good folks at this Korean grocery store will make six different namool and package them with a small cup of kochu jang, requiring you to merely press "start" on the rice cooker at home. (I meant to have a picture here for you but I forgot to take it. I'll try to add it in again the next time we eat bibimbap.) The package contains enough namool to feed about four people, maybe more especially if you dress it up a bit. Which leads me to...
Upgrades! Now you can add-on to this meal of convenience as your time and energy allow. I will commonly add egg, either a fried egg (sunny, hold the wiggle) on each bowl, or cooked in omelet sheets and sliced into thin shreds. Also, if i can work it out, some meat (usually beef, but chicken and pork work well too) sautéed with some sweetened soy sauce (like soy sauce with some green onion, ginger, grated apple, garlic, sesame oil and sugar) but it's really not necessary and we would only use a tiny bit anyways. I like to add some nori cut into thin strips (like about 3mm x 25mm) but I don't always have the patience to cut it up.
So really, what could be easier than washing some rice in the morning, setting the timer on your rice cooker, and stopping by the grocery store on your way home? This post was composed to convince Tina to try it.
Side Note: My first taste of bibimbap was enjoyed in Japan in 2000, thanks to Mark who took us to a Korean restaurant. They specialized in a variant called dolsot bibimbap which is served in a stone bowl which has been heated up to the point where it essentially fries the rice for you after it has been served to you. It comes topped with a raw egg, which also cooks from the heat of the bowl once you mix it up. My favourite part was the little browned bits of chili-coated rice that stuck to the stone, like what the French would call fond (pan scapings) but what Mark taught us is called koge in Japanese. Why isn't there a word for this in English? We ate dolsot bibimbap a few more times during that visit to Japan including once at a mall food court, and I kept thinking "They would never serve this in a Canadian mall, imagine carrying a red-hot stone bowl to your table on a flimsy plastic tray. A safety hazard for sure!" Yet upon our return I was pleasantly surprised to see a Korean food stall at the Yaohan food court in Richmond serving it. The first time I ordered it there, the proprietor (upon sizing me up as a non-Korean) made sure to remind me to bring the bowl back to them after eating.
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