Korean Abdul Jabbar (now with less ugly picture)

This is a recipe for something I make pretty regularly. It's called "Korean Abdul Jabbar". It is called this because I am not Korean, and probably neither is this recipe. This is just a standard soup recipe, every ingredient in here can be substituted with something else and you can throw almost anything else in there and it will be fine.

Ingredients:

• 2 carrots, peeled and chopped into whatever size and shape you like

• 1 stalk celery, chopped (optional, some people don’t like it, I don't think Korea uses it at all but what do I know)

• 1 potato, same deal

• 1 chicken breast (optional, use whatever meat you want or none it doesn’t matter)

• Half a large white onion, diced

• 3 – 10 cloves of garlic, minced

• A whole bunch of kimchi. You’re probably not using enough. Put more kimchi in there. No, more than that too.

• A really big heaping tablespoon of doenjang (salty Korean fermented soybean paste). Don’t have doenjang? Use red miso. Don’t have that? Just put a lot of soy sauce in there, it’ll taste about the same anyway.

• A tablespoon of soy sauce unless you already substituted it for the doenjang.

• Some rice vinegar (put one tablespoon at a time and wait 5 minutes then taste the soup before adding more. If you put too much it won't be that bad but it might be kind of weird, especially since the kimchi is already going to be kind of sour.

• Mirin or sugar or something, probably like half the amount of vinegar that you use or less. You need something sweet or this thing is going to be incredibly salty. Only add a little at a time, making a sweet soup is DISGUSTING and if you do that you should THROW IT IN THE GARBAGE and then you should KEEP YOURSELF SAFE.

• Sesame oil (completely optional, if you don’t have it don’t worry about it).

• A jar of beef stock your dear mother gave to you because she’s the best person in the world, or if you don’t have that, just use a box of store bought chicken stock, or water is fine too, just less body in the broth if you go that direction, maybe add more of some of the other liquid ingredients to make up for it.

• Black pepper, lots of it.

• Something spicy (optional). Gochugaru if you want to try to make this at least a little authentic, but authenticity is overrated, so if you don’t got that, just chuck a bunch of the kind of chili flakes you’d put on your pizza in there, you probably won’t notice the difference anyway. Or cayenne pepper is fine too since it’s flavor neutral anyway. Or if you don’t want this to be spicy, don’t put anything, I don’t care what you do.

Directions:

You only need one pan, a regular sized saucepan, to make this. Put it over a little bit more than medium heat and put some olive oil in there, then add the onions, carrots, celery, and garlic. If you don’t stir it very much, it’ll all start to brown a little after 5 or 10 minutes. I don’t know, I didn’t look at my fricking stopwatch while I was cooking it, ok?

Once it browns some, add the doenjang or miso, the pepper, and the chili flakes or gochugaru. If you substituted soy sauce for the doenjang, DON’T add it now, you’ll just steam everything. Let all the shit in the pan turn really brown. At the heat level your stove is at, you are not going to burn anything unless you leave it for an hour, so don’t worry about it.

Dump the stock or water in the pan and scrape all the crap off the bottom. If you didn’t brown it much, there won’t be any crap, but that’s ok, your soup will still be fine, stop stressing about everything, it’s bad for your blood pressure.

Put the whole chicken breast in the soup. Wait, are you leaving the skin on the chicken breast? That’s AWFUL and you are RUINING the soup. Tear it off with your hands and throw it in the trash, all it will do is make your soup greasy. Add the potatoes and tons of kimchi, then add the soy sauce and a little bit of vinegar and mirin (ONLY A LITTLE IF YOU FRICK THIS UP I SWEAR TO GOD…). If the chicken breast is not submerged, add water to the pot. Bring the whole shebang to a boil and then turn it down so it’s still boiling a little and put a lid on it.

After 30 minutes, fish the chicken breast out with a fork, put it in a bowl, then use two forks to shred it into little bitty pieces. Then dump the chicken back into the pot. Taste the broth and add shit if it needs it. Soy sauce if it’s not salty enough, vinegar if you can’t notice any vinegar at all (if you taste any, leave it alone) and mirin only if it seems like it’s too salty or too whatever and you’re trying to round out the flavor a little. DON’T ADD A WHOLE BUNCH OF SUGAR I WILL KILL YOU.

Cook it for another 30 minutes. When there’s like 5 minutes left, put a splash of sesame oil in there. Don’t use too much. It won’t ruin the soup if you do, but it will kind of overwhelm some of the other flavors, which would be a shame.

Put it in a big bowl and feel ashamed of your bigoted cultural appropriation. If you know any Korean people, send them the recipe so they can shit on you for being an ignorant round eye. The end.