Sundubo (First Attempt)

Well, I am finally back at my house(I was in Detroit before visiting my parents like a good son). It took me a couple of days to get settled in, but last night I was ready to cook for the first time in 3 months! Can you believe it, its been 3 months since I had been home!!

The first recipe I wanted to try was for Sudubo because its one of my favorite dishes. I used the recipe from Maangchi's website. I had my laptop up in my kitchen as I cooked so I could follow along her video.

Right now I have all my stuff packed up in boxes in storage because I am in the process of moving right now. So I had to go into my storage shed and pull out my rice cooker, pots and pans, and utensils! It was quite the project...much tougher then finding stuff in your drawers or cabinets! Anyways once I got all that sorted out, it was fairly smooth sailing (except for the recipe calls for onion, which wasn't listed in the ingredients section at the front of the recipe (so that was a second trip to the store!)
Anyways here are some progression photos:

Cooking the broth/base (water, shitake mushrooms, onion, anchovies) the white stuff is from all the boiling (I couldnt get the picture to rotate!):


Starting the Sundubo (pieces of beef, olive oil, broth/stock, pepper flakes):


Added the seafood (mixed seafood of shrimp, oysters, crab) and tofu (the most important part!):



Added "Greens" (green onion and a Jalepeno pepper.) The recipe calls for green chili pepper, however I live in a small town and Walmart only had Jalepeno peppers (gotta make do with what you've got!):



The finished product!! (Unfortunately I dont have any stone bowls yet, so this glass pot has to do!):



Here is the final setting at the table. Can you tell Im a bachelor? Like I said, everything is in storage and my house is really sparse right now. So Im trying to get by for the next two weeks on the bare minimums (those donuts kept me alive during the cooking because I didnt start cooking until 9 PM!!!)



It was excellent. It took about an hour to cook, the broth took near 40 minutes and the the chigae itself was only about 15 minutes! It didnt taste exactly like what Im used too, but probably like everything you have to refine the recipe. I would say its a 4/10 difficulty. Not very hard to make. Taste wise I would give it a 6/10. There are a few things I would change. I would use pork instead of beef. The beef flavor was too strong. I would also broil the meat or something instead of pan frying to make it softer. The other big improvement would be to strain the pepper flakes. Maangchi's recipe didnt call for it, but I think I would use the pepper flakes to make the broth/stock, then strain it so there weren't so many floating around in the chigae.

It was still very good and a lot of fun to make one of my favorite dishes!