Monthly Archives: June 2018

Korean Entree

BULGOGI
(Barbecued Beef)

INGREDIENTS – MARINADE

4 garlic cloves
1 green onion
1 nashi pear or bosc pear
1⅓ pounds sirloin, beef tenderloin, or rib eye
1½ tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon ginger
¼ teaspoon pepper
1½ tablespoons rice wine or sake
¼ cup soy sauce

INGREDIENTS – REST

½ leek
1 medium yellow onion
1 teaspoon sesame seeds

SPECIAL UTENSILS

mandoline (useful, but not essential)
wok (or large pan)

Serves 4. Takes 2 hours 40 minutes..

PREPARATION – MARINADE

Mince garlic cloves. Dice green onion. Peel, core, and grate or dice pear. Slice sirloin into strips ⅛” thick. Then cut strips into 3″-by-1″ rectangles. Add all marinade ingredients to mixing bowl. Toss ingredients until sirloin rectangles are well coated. Cover and marinate in refrigerator for 2 hours.

PREPARATION – REST

While sirloin rectangles, marinate, dice onion. Use mandoline or knife to slice leek and onion into strips ⅛” thick. Add sesame seeds to pan. Toast sesame seeds at medium heat for 5 minutes or until they start to brown. Stir occasionally. Reserve sesame seeds.

Add sirloin with its marinade, leek, and onion to wok. Heat at high heat for 4 minutes or until sirloin browns and is cooked to your liking. Stir occasionally. Garnish with toasted sesame seeds.

TIDBITS

1) Bulgogi is made with sesame seeds.

2) Sesame seeds look like bugs.

3) Bugs move. All the time. Don’t even think of asking them to pose for a portrait.

4) So when scientists want to examine a particular, fixed pattern of bugs, they use sesame seeds in place of the bugs.

5) Or “in lieu of” of the bugs. “In lieu of” sounds fancier than “in place of,” don’t ya think?

6) Anyway, these bug patterns can consist of up to two-million sesame seeds. These large patterns can take sixty sesame-placers a whole year to construct.

7) So, when someone sneezes on the intricate sesame-seed pattern, the bug scientists (entomologists, another cool word) get rather irate.

8) On May 4, 1937, the famed aviator, Amelia Earhart, visited the prestigious American Institute of Sesame Seed Patterns (AISSP) to raise funds for her round-the-world-by-air adventure.

9) Ms. Earhadt wowed the men of the institute. Massive funding from AISSP was promised.

10) Then Amelia sneezed. A gale-force sneeze. 1,223,768 carefully seeds scattered all over the room.

11) Just two more sesames seeds had been needed to form the needed sesame pattern. At which point, photographs would have been taken.

12) Analysis of these photographs would have enabled entomologists to eradicate grasshopper plagues. Massive swarms of these insects had wiped out North Dakotan agriculture in 1935 and that of Montana a year later.

13) Ms. Earhart became deeply unpopular. Indeed, torch-carrying sesame-entomologists chased her to her plane. She quickly started her Model 10-E Electra and decided to start her round-the-world flight. If she had more time, she could have gotten a plane with more sophisticated communications and a longer range.

14) Alas, she, her navigator, Fred Noonan, and her plane disappeared on July 2, 1937.

15) Ten years later, Amos Keeto, photographer from the Paducah Post, realized that he taken a quick picture of Amelia at the AISSP. He was sure that the picture’s background would show the nearly completed sesame pattern. Unfortunately, he’d given the picture to the famed aviator as a keepsake just before she left on her fatal journey.

16) If only that picture could be retrieved, we could figure out how to stop all insect-caused crop failures forever. This is why we keep searching for Amelia Earhart and her plane.

Chef Paul

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.