Hello steemians! This is my second post (yay!) I‘ve been reading up on the basics of steemit. There is so much to learn and honestly I’m a bit overwhelmed. I decided to take one step at a time with all the how-to-use-steemit information—I don’t even know how to upload a profile photo yet. I’m starting to understand how lost my mom feels with her digital gadgets. So I won’t stress myself over the technicalities and focus more on what interests me most: writing a post! So here I am writing my second post.
As I said in my last post, my posts will be predominantly about food, especially Korean food.
So first, here’s a photo of what I had for dinner yesterday with my husband.
I made fried pork with kimchi and bell pepper as the main banchan (the one in the middle).
Wait, do you know what banchan is?
If you’re new to the Korean cusine, there is some very basic knowledge you need to know about the category of dishes that an average Korean meal consists of.
First, there is 밥 (pronounced bop) which means steamed rice. This is the staple food in the Korean diet shared by other Asian countries. Steamed rice is bland (a new vocabulary I recently learned from watching the movie Julie and Julia) so you want to have other dishes that are not bland (is there a word for not bland? I couldn’t think of one) that go with the rice.
So that’s why you need 반찬 (banchan; both a’s are pronounced “ah”) which is the not-bland dish that goes with your steamed rice. Kimchi, one of the quite well-known Korean food, is a banchan. Bulgogi is also a banchan. Banchan is basically the dish that accompanies rice.
A common Korean table will look something like this:
The number of banchans is up to you. You can make just one banchan if you want, although that may ignite some complaints from your companions at the table.
You may think, but how can you make so many banchans for every meal? Those side banchans are the secret. There are many side banchans (called mit-banchan) that you can make in bulk and store for a few days or even up to a few months in the fridge.
Aside from the banchans, there is a variety of soups and stews that you can add to your meal and have with steamed rice. But going there will make this post way too long than it already is, so I’ll talk about soups and stews some other time.
Let me end my post with some photos of the Korean meals I made in the past few months. Thank you for reading!
P.S. You can find more photos on my instagram.