Minhato

I think you are the best person to decide what dish is best for your family. For instance, my family loves spicy food so, their first Korean dish was bibimbap, then deokgalbi, and lately sambap. They love every dish so much. I’ve made also successfully doenjang jjiggae.

In my case, I tried to make dishes I found specially different to the ones of my country cuisine. Gochujang and doenjang make it totally different. Otherwise, dishes like japchae, although they are ok, they are nothing special for me so I don’t make them for my family either.

My advice: just think if they like spicy or not, think what dish you like specially and if you think your family would enjoy it too and act accordinly.

Good luck!

When you are in Korea, you can see they use it many times. For instance, if you order ssambap or samgyopsal at the restaurants, they will give you some gochu you can add to the wrap.

I was thinking about it and another option is to modify Mangchi’s kimchi fried rice a little bit to make a different dish. In Korea you can find kimchi tuna fried rice (made with canned tuna) (김치참치볶음밥) or bacon fried rice (베이컨에그볶음밥), meat fried rice (소고기볶음밥)… You can modify it freely depending on what you have on your fridge. I can’t give you recipes for those but if you copy the name in hangeul in google and you search in images you can see clearly what ingredients you need to use.

Hi Jordango,

Having kimchi, gochujang and red pepper powder you can make a lot of yummy and fast dishes and they last a long time so it’s great. I like convenient, cheap and fast too so having only those 3 ingredients you can make:

-ddeokbokki: I buy the rice cakes in the korean shop and put them in the freezer and make whenever. It takes 5 minutes or so to make (I make smaller quantity of maangchi’s recipe).

– bibimguksu: you’ll need just cucumber and egg, but even without cucumber it tastes great. And you can boil several eggs and keep them on fridge for several days too!

– Ssambap: If you make rice, make some meat just boiled or fried cut in pieces and buy some veggie like lettuce or perilla leaves you get ssambap. Later you only have to wrap the veggie in a bit of gochujang, the veggie, rice and some garlic or so if you want and that’s it.

– kimchijjiggae: Only pork and tofu needed.

– kimchi pajeon: Just eggs needed.

That’s what I can think of but I’m sure there are more recipes with few ingredients and fast. Just remember not to be careful with the salt intake as both kimchi and gochujang are salty so it wouldn’t be healthy to eat them every day.

Good luck cooking!