Interactive cooking

Would you like to make some Korean food with me?  I am making bulgogi, which looks like this in Korean:

That literally translates as "fire meat", but don't be scared.  It's not spicy at all.  It's just usually cooked over a fire (grill).  I don't think real Koreans have crockpots, but I'm not a real Korean, so I put mine in the crockpot and cook it all day so the meat gets really tender.

 Let's get started.  I pretty much start everything with garlic, because I love it.  This is the biggest clove of garlic I've ever seen!  I usually buy the little boxes of garlic at Kroger, but after I saw this clove, I looked more carefully at my box and noticed it said "jumbo" on it.  Normally, I would use 4 or 5 cloves, but since these were so huge, I only used two.

I chopped an onion and minced the garlic.

Now for the marinade/sauce. (Real Koreans marinate the meat and then grill it.  I hate to throw away a good marinade, so I cook it in the crockpot and eat the whole thing).  I always use lite soy sauce, because it still has plenty of salt.  That second bottle is sesame oil, which is not exactly cheap, but it's a must.  Today I'm using red wine, because that's what I have.  I've also used white wine before.  If you're anti-wine, you could use 7-Up.  And finally some sugar.  I don't really measure, but I would guess I use about 1/3 C of soy sauce, 2 or 3 T oil, 1/3 C wine, and about 2 T sugar.

I also add a bunch of black pepper to the marinade.  I recently decided to try fresh-cracked pepper instead of my usual ground, but I was too cheap to buy a good peppermill.  I found this little plastic peppermill full of peppercorn for about a dollar at Aldi.

I mix the marinade, onions, and garlic in the crockpot.

If I lived alone, I would use tofu instead of meat, because meat grosses me out in general.  But for my family of carnivores, I bought meat. I use whatever meat I can get cheap.  This is about a pound and a half of top round.  It was starting to turn brown, so it was marked down.