Sausage Tteokbokki Dinner
I said I liked green and orange food, right?
After watching shitloads of K-dramas this year we fell in love with Korean food, and a trip to our local Asian store today meant we had tteokbokki! I wanted to make a full dinner out of it since it was quite pricey, so I needed to add meat. I’ve used mince to make a sort of mapo tofu/tteokbokki fusion before, but today we had sausages that needed using, and I thought they would probably be alright with it.
I cut a load of cheap sausages into a hot pan, making sure I overheated the pan and didn't add enough oil so that all the sausages stuck and lost their skins. 🥲 I added some water to ‘deglaze’ (aka stop them setting on fire), then took some out for lunches once they were cooked. This picture is embarrassing, don’t do this. Just, like, cook the sausages properly.
I then added enough boiling water to just cover the sausages, a tea strainer full of dried anchovies and a big spoonful each of gochujang, ketchup, soy sauce and some sugar. Normally I’d put more gochujang, but my 8 year old needed to eat too and loves to faff around ineffectually with chopsticks, and I like to watch him try.
Once that was all bubbling, I added half a thinly wedged onion, spring onions cut into lengths with the scissors, 2 packs of tteokbokki and some frozen green beans. I was going to add some pak choi but I thought it was one too many crunchy green things. Something like mushrooms or broccoli would be really good too! Just make sure you have some green stuff, it’s important.
It gets shiny and super bubbly like a volcano as the rice cakes release some starch, then I just tasted it using a tiny bowl like in anime and waited for everything to cook. I also let the boy taste it as it was his dinner too. It was obv a bit spicy for him but he thinks I’m impressed by his mature palate, so he said it was fine. Some of those sausages look so much more cooked than others, but that’s just because of their unconventional hybrid cooking method 😭—if you don’t have to boil them they’ll look normal.
Once the veg and tteokbokki were nicely soft, I thickened it just a little bit with cornflour slurry and stirred it through. The kid had it as it was, but I added fresh spring onions, sesame seeds and toasted chilli sesame oil to mine and hubs’, because I love a garnish. And I wanted it to look pretty for its photo. 🥰
It was delicious, if a bit ketchupy since I didn’t add all the gochujang I would normally. While eating we watched Tsurune on CR, and the kid argued with me about whether tteokbokki counted as pasta (ofc not) and what bread was made of (not corn). We’ve got leftovers for lunch too!
