Bul Go Gi - Korean Food for today's thoughts

No ruminations, just food for my thoughts today. This was our Father's Day/Jeff's birthday meal. He spoke Korean on his mission and fell in love with the food (and the people). It's absolutely delicious and super duper easy. The cake is obviously not Korean, but it's also really really good. But the cake is not super duper easy (it's kind of time-intensive, but worth it).

Bul Go Gi (Korean Fire Meat)

This is the very best thing in the whole world. I'd even pick Bul Go Gi over cookies, that's how good it is! It melts in your mouth. Yum. I usually buy a 2 lb. oven roast (eye of round) which would technically double the recipe, except I really like the sauce so I actually triple everything else. Have the grocery store butcher slice the roast as thinly as possible - just barely thick enough to hold together.

1 lb. beef, thinly sliced

4 Tbs. brown sugar

2 Tbs. sesame oil

6 Tbs. soy sauce

few grains black pepper

1 green onion, chopped w/tops

1 clove garlic, minced or pressed

4 Tbs. sesame seeds (you can toast these lightly in a skillet for extra flavor & crunch)

1 Tbs. flour

Combine sugar & oil in a 1 gl. zip-top plastic bag & mix well. Add soy sauce, pepper, chopped onion, garlic, sesame seed & flour and mix well in bag. (I just mush it around) Add meat and mush it around to coat as much as possible ("mush" is a word, isn't it?). Seal bag and lay on plate or place in large bowl and marinate overnight or at least a couple of hours in the refrigerator. You can grill the meat, but it's so thin that it sticks to the grill and cooks really fast (ie, burns easily), so I prefer to cook ( working in batches) on a skillet in a small amount of oil until tender. Don't overcook. Any left-over marinade can be used to cook chopped bok choy, spinach, kale or other veggie of choice. Serve with sticky rice, mandu (we just use pre-made frozen pot stickers), and - if you have a steel stomach - kim chi. Home bottled peaches are really tasty with this meal.

German Chocolate Cake

A friend gave me this recipe years ago, and I've been guarding it as a secret family recipe ever since. Guarding it, that is, until I noticed one time that the recipe was a verbatim copy of the one on the back of the Baker's German Chocolate bar (find it with the chocolate chips). So I'm not going to re-write the recipe. It's on the box. I would just say that if you use cake flour, it makes the batter rise too much for 2 cake pans (9"), so use three (work in batches if you don't have 3 pans). I also frost the outside with a buttercream chocolate frosting because, well, you can never have too much chocolate.