Another Tokyo Thanksgiving

You may recall that last year's Thanksgiving was a bit of a fiasco.  There was a toasted chicken, burnt stuffing, and a power outage.  Don't get me wrong- it was totally worth it, but we decided to go a bit more low key this year.
It sounds a bit like the set up for a bad joke: What do you get when a Chinese American and a Filipino American cook a Thanksgiving dinner in Japan?  The answer is after the jump.

Wings frying...hey it's poultry- that's Thanksgiving-ish!

Did you guess Korean food?  You guessed right!  After a sudden craving for Bon Chon chicken hit a few weeks ago, we decided it was only right that we turn this into an entire meal for Turkey Day.  What goes with KFC (Korean Friend Chicken)?  At Bon Chon, they give you a little container of pickled daikon radish.  We eat that kind of side dish a lot around these parts, so we decided to switch it up a bit with some of our other favorite Korean dishes.

Mise en place for Jap Chae - don't I cut veggies nicely?

We had our meal on Friday, since we have work and school on the actual day.  I got up that morning and made the cucumber kimchi.  All the recipes online said to make this just before eating it.  They said that it didn't need to sit around and ferment like regular kimchi, but I thought I knew better.  So I made it that morning.  Turns out those people know what they're talking about.  I ate a piece right after I made it.  It was crunchy, spicy, and delicious.  After sitting in the fridge for 6 or so hours, it was mushy and salty.  Oh well- live and learn!

Cucumber kimchi- spicy!

After heading in to work for about an hour (had my one year evaluation- it went great!), I came home to start the jap chae.  Jap chae is a very popular Korean noodle dish.  It's similar to Chinese mei fun or Filipino pancit.  It's made with lots of thinly sliced vegetables and some meat.  We couldn't find the right noodles here in Tokyo, but the flavor was still pretty good.

Noodles with beef, veggies, soy sauce, sesame oil, and sesame seeds

The star of the show was the chicken.  We decided on just frying drumettes- no one likes the other part of the wing anyway.  Those bad boys got soaked in a batter of four, cornstarch, and water.  They got fried in the hot oil not once, but twice.  After they reached their maximum level of crispiness, they got treated to a nice slathering in the sauce: gochujang (red pepper paste), a ton of garlic and ginger, honey, soy sauce, and rice vinegar.  This stuff is addictive!

Can you see the fiery crunchiness?

And lastly came my favorite Korean appetizer.  We've eaten this seafood pancake at many different places.  The fillings vary, and so does the tastiness.  Sometimes its too mushy, and sometimes it's nice and crispy.  I personally like the one at Gah Rham in Beltsville, but it's pretty much always yummy.  This was our first attempt at making what should be a very easy dish.  We decided to fill ours with the obligatory scallions and shrimp but also added oysters (why not?).  My instinct told me to make two smaller pancakes for optimum crunch, but my impatience had me dump everything in the pan.

Look at all those oysters

As I suspected, it turned out kind of gooey in the middle- but it was still good!  Anything would be good dipped in the sauce I made out of soy sauce, honey, garlic, scallions, sugar, and spicy red pepper powder.  Just open some wine and enjoy.

The final feast (yes those are the same candles from last year)

So maybe this table didn't look very much like your Thanksgiving meal, but it was ours and we loved it.  It was fun to break from tradition and just do something different.  That being said, I'm looking forward to being back home eating all the classics next year!  Happy Thanksgiving!