감 자 탕 (kam ja tang)

Tom and I are on our way to completing our third year in Korea! It's hard to believe.  After living here for a while we have gotten ourselves into a culinary rut.  We have our favorite restaurants and Korean meals that we frequent on a regular basis, and while it's nice to have a rhythm to life and dependable restaurants  we decided we needed a new Korean adventure.  Back in the fall I went with a big group of people (without Tom) to eat 감 자 탕 (kam ja tang) and I really enjoyed it.  I was convinced Tom would like it as well so finally after months of me building it up, Tom and I took a risk and tried a new (for us anyway) Korean dish.  This is 감 자 탕 (kam ja tang) before it has started cooking: 

This is was a very "Korean" style place; we sat on the floor and this big bowl of pork, potatoes, mushrooms, other random ingredients, and red spices cooked in front of us.  It is basically like a pork and potato stew.

One thing that was added to the stew after a bit was dumplings! You can kind of see them floating in the cooking pot above.

It didn't take too long to cook and the meat was so tender.  The meat also came attached to the bone.  And I'm not talking nice pretty bones.  I'm talking about vertebrae!  It's not a pleasant sight, but once we got past the looks of things it was tasty.  They even give us a bowl to dump our random bones in once we got all the meat off (see below).

To eat the stew we each had our own, personal bowl.  Here is mine; clearly I hogged the dumplings.  I've been craving my Grammy Jo's chicken and dumplings so this was like the Korean version of what I've been wanting.

After we ate most of the meat and potatoes, ramen noodles are added to the stew.  It's like the meal that keeps on giving.

Overall, we really enjoyed our meal and hope to eat it again sometime soon.  Lately we've been eating a lot of Korean food because this baby loves spicy, red Korean goodness.   I still have a pretty strong aversion to Mexican food, but I've been really digging anything Asian.

On a random note, it was ridiculous how long it took me to type the title of this post using Korean letters. Because my laptop is from the school my keyboard has both the English and Korean alphabet on the keyboard. I look at this keyboard pretty much everyday and yet it took me forever to find these Korean letters that are constantly in front of my eyes.  It makes you wonder how many things do we see every day and yet completely miss?