Korean Rice Porridge | The Vegetarian

By the time the twelve magnificent courses were over, my wife had eaten nothing but salad and kimchi, and a little bit of squash porridge. She hadn’t even touched the sticky-rice porridge, as they had used a special recipe involving beef stock to give it a rich, luxurious taste.
The Vegetarian
Han King

It’s getting closer to spring and the days are still freezing. Most of my week has been spent in an office, hearing the rain outside and eagerly looking forward to the walk back to the station with headphones in and a good podcast playing.

I’ve been doing a slow reread of The Vegetarian this last week, snatching brief moments of time in my day before and after work to get through a few pages. The Vegetarian is a novel that is always horrifying to me every time I read it - I’m not exactly sure why. Han Kang manages to create such amazing visuals with her writing style, a style that left me shuddering a little at some descriptions. My cook for this week was the

While my parents were both great cooks when I was growing up - we never really ventured into any Asian style cooking at home. And I was never that adventurous later in my life, I feel like most of my culinary choices were somewhat basic, with any Asian influences limited to Pad Thai or fried rice. There are numerous amazing sounding dishes mentioned throughout The Vegetarian, and I chose to go with one that is (surprisingly) no vegetarian. This recipe was created to be plant based and is but can easily be adapted to one that is not.

Note: I used some leftover faux beef chunks I had. Because they aren’t really raw meat, I just shredded them into pieces before I marinated them. If you’re using real meat, I would slice into shreds and ensure you cook them well. This recipe can also be made with already cooked meat.

Korean Beef Rice Porridge
Serves 3
Ingredients
1 cup rice
8 cups of beef stock + 2 cups extra if needed
200g beef *see note
1 tbsp oil
2 tbsp soy sauce
3 garlic cloves, minced
Spring onion, thinly sliced for garnish

1. Slice up whatever type of beef you’re using and cover with 1 tbsp the soy sauce and minced garlic. Leave to marinate for about 10 minutes.

2. Leave the rice to soak in water for at least an hour and then rinse off until the water comes clear.

3. Heat the oil in a medium saucepan and add the marinated beef in once the oil is hot. Cook briefly until the meat is cooked through, add in the rice and the beef stock.

4. Leave on high until boiling, and then lower the heat so it is just simmering. Add in the remaining soy sauce.

5. Leave to simmer for around 30 minutes, adding in the extra stock if necessary. You want to keep quite a bit of liquid in the final product. Once the rice has reached the right consistency, quite creamy, serve straight away with the spring onions for garnish. Enjoy!