I’ve been flat out with my studies, so haven’t really had much time for cooking or blogging, poor me So, in the meantime, I’ve got a recipe from my mom to tide you through till I return! This is divine, and traditionally eaten with lettuce – you get a lettuce leaf, put a spoonful of cooked rice in the middle, then a piece of the pork, then wrap it up and eat it! The lettuce is handy for a few reasons – it adds a vegetable element to this dish, as well as helping to balance out the chilli in this dish as it is veeeery spicy (well, not to me as I’ve been eating chilli dishes since I was 3, but to anyone not quite as desensitised as me it’ll burn just a little!).

The red is not from any filter or mucking around with the photo – the pork really is this red!

Ingredients

1kg pork belly, sliced reasonably thin (usually about 5mm)
5 tbsp caster sugar
5 tbsp korean chilli paste (gotchujjang)
1 tbsp garlic
1/2 onion, grated
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp sesame oil

To Serve
Cooked rice
Lettuce (we usually use red or green oak lettuce, but it’s fine with iceberg or red coral)

1. Mix together all ingredients and marinate the pork for a few hours, or overnight if you can.

2. Heat a non-stick frying pan or grill, place the pork on and cook till the meat is well done.

3. Serve with rice and lettuce leaves to make wraps

So there you go – quick and easy! It might be a bit of a struggle to find the korean chilli paste, but you should be able to find it at most Chinese or Korean grocery stores

This is the arrangement of a lettuce wrap known as ’ssam’ in Korean – an open lettuce leaf, a smal spoonful of rice, some ‘namul banchan’ (root/stringy vegetable side dishes), a spoonful of gochujjang (Korean chilli paste) and the pork!

Once everything has been placed in the lettuce leaf, it is then carefully wrapped like so and eaten up in one or two bites – delicious, and a guaranteed way of getting the kids to devour half a head of lettuce on their own!

Technorati Tags: pork, chilli, korean food, korean cooking

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