Dakgalbi Recipe: Tested

I didn't tell anyone about testing out my recipe, mostly because it's super embarrassing. But I'm sure it will provide for a good laugh.

I'll start out by saying that my cooking experiments in Korea usually turn out like my shopping excursions: Sometimes great, other times disastrous. Ironically, the humor of this story starts out at the grocery store. Of course my little supermarket doesn't have chicken thighs. (They've been known to run out of potatoes and bread on a regular basis - I'm surprised they have chicken breasts sometimes.) There was a different...cut of chicken though. AND it was on clearance. Note: Never buy clearance meat. Sadly, it took a few times for me to learn that the hard way.

It looked kind of like kidneys or lungs... I asked the guy in the meat department to show me with my phone dictionary what kind of meat it was. He showed me "military guard." Pretty sure that wasn't correct. And he pointed to his butt cheek. My thought process after that:

"Ohhhh... I didn't think chicken butt cheeks were that big. But this makes sense. These little cuts are small. I'm sure it's dark meat too. Chicken butt cheeks will work just fine. AND they're on clearance. Perfect."


I'm sure you all can guess what happened next... I made the dish and it looked good. I tasted it - tasted the chicken. It was... tough and chewy and didn't exactly taste delicious. Hmmm... Thennnnnn the lightbulb went on. I cooked chicken rectum. I just ate chicken butt hole. Grossssss. Needless to say I settled on PB&J that night.

On a brighter note, tonight I decided to try again - this time with breasts. It was delicious. And I used ramen noodles instead of rice. I highly recommend it because the pepper sauce/paste recipe is a bit sweet. The noodles mix great with the sweet stir fry and cheese.

Question of the day: How many times in your life have you eaten an animals butt hole? (I hope this answer is zero.) If you prefer chicken butt hole, I have a whole pound of it waiting in my freezer for you.

This is close to what my dish looked like. Don't let the yummy appearance fool you!