Monday, June 24, 2013

A Korean Feast in East Hawaii

A Korean feast in store overlooking Keaukaha bay


There's no shortage of cuisine that our international food group hasn't covered from around the globe. Even though our island lacks many of the wonderful cuisines of the world, it's great that food groups like ours can experiment and share our cooking discoveries with our monthly themed events.

This month we are discovering Korean cooking and the many different and exotic dishes that our cooking group is presenting today, come join us. Usually we start off our get-together with pupus (small plates) or in Korean, they are called banchan. Usually the banchan covers an assortment of 2- 10 small side dishes in which kimchee is the most well known and popular offered at every meal.


Would you like to try some of these delicious offerings, some marinated quail eggs and pickled vegetables?





One of the most popular was this baked potstickers or mandu, these dumplings were filled with avocados with a soyu based sauce. It didn't take too long for this banchan appetizer to be devoured quickly.







Some of the members were already starving and couldn't help themselves to taking a quick bite.





Prior to our big feast, it's our tradition to have a quick discussion of the dish we prepared with the main ingredients and the cooking process. The crowd was pretty hungry at this point so the explanations went rather fast so we could chow down right away. All right, it's finally time to dig in, everyone get in line and lets get started.  Let's see what are the main offerings for our luncheon





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First up, marinated chicken wings and drumsticks in a sticky sweet and sour marinade.





Next we have some fried green onions in a light batter and a soyu sesame glaze sauce - who wants to try?





How about some succulent pork belly with pickled onions and wrapped in lettuce like a Korean burrito.




This savory Korean noodle dish called chapchae are delicious and made with sweet potato noodles which surprisingly is not that sweet, but the noodle is quite flavorful and spicy with all the sauce that it absorbs.






You can't have a Korean meal without some marinated barbecue and this beef barbecue was melt-in-our mouth perfect and oh so good!





Another barbeque with sesame chicken to be wrapped with fresh lettuce below.




What did I bring you may ask? I'm presenting a fried tofu dish with spicy bell pepper and eggplant in a mild sweet and sour sauce. Would you like to sample some, there's enough to go around.




Koreans usually don't partake in dessert but our group absolutely insists! The dessert offerings were amazing and to die for - very different from typical Asian sweets or desserts. Our first delicious dessert that were these wrapped persimmons with walnuts called gotgamssam, have just one bite and you just might want to eat the whole plate.

Oh so flaky and flavorful manju or baked sweet pastry, this one was filled with a sweet bean and lilikoi (passionfruit) paste.




This is a fun and social group, we even had a slippah fashion show after the luncheon and a few made it out to the gorgeous lagoon for a quick and refreshing dip, it's all for fun and enjoying the day out by the ocean.


 

 

View out to the bay with many little inlets from the dining pavilion at Keaukaha park.  

 

 

  Delicious Korean food, good wine and the company of friends that love to cook, what a fantastic end to our cooking event by the ocean in East Hawaii.


 



©Noel Morata, All rights reserved


Come and visit my photography travel website at http://travelphotodiscovery.com/
 

12 comments:

  1. I have never tried Korean food, but I am dying to do so. It seems so versatile. The fried green onions in a batter look yummy!

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  2. Noel, the photos are amazing, as usual...Great food and a gorgeous location...is this the area just by Richardson's Beach?

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  3. Oh my goodness gracious ... I was a tad bit hungry before I started reading this post, and now I'm downright famished (and drooling). I'll take a serving of everything please. :)

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  4. Great job on the pictures, Noel. Mahalo!

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  5. This place is amazing - like a paradise! Beautiful photography!

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  6. Wow, the food looks so delicious. I love lettuce wraps. YUMMY! Beautiful scenery and good friends, sounds like an awesome time. Great photos.

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  7. Awesome pictures!
    Tempting food presentation.

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  8. What a wonderful meal! We have an area in NYC called Korean Town. Reminds me that I want to return there and look for some of those potstickers!:-)

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  9. My jaw dropped! Now I'm REALLY hungry, Noel! I would be curious to try a pickled quail egg albeit with a little bit of trepidation. But, if anyone turned their heads the other direction I would run like the wind with both plate of potstickers and pork belly! Love the pictures as always :)

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  10. Beautiful pictures and very tempting presentation of the food. How I would like the recipes for these dishes.

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  11. What a delicious looking feast! I want to taste everything but those noodles and that pork belly are calling my name.
    My NYC foodie friends and I used to go to Koreatown for Korean BBQ and no matter how sparingly we tried to eat, we never had room for dessert and could just barely push ourselves from the table.
    So can I come to your next event?

    And I have an apology. I discovered by accident last week that my browser, Firefox, hasn't been playing well with Blogger so none of my comments have been recorded. It's a pain as I have no idea when this started happening and I've been commenting on a lot of Blogger blogs. Sorry!

    Thanks for linking up this week, Noel.

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  12. I think that I would really enjoy that mandu as well as the rest of this feast. The Korean families at our school often make chapchae for our International Food Festival, so I've had that one before.

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