Creamy Gochujang Pasta

I like to cook…mostly because I like to eat. But I’m a recipe follower, not a recipe creator. On the rare occasion I try to “whip something up,” I’m generally left dissatisfied by the results. However, this time I created something that I actually liked: Creamy Gochujang Pasta.

Some months ago I saw a pasta recipe online that used gochujang with milk and cheese (and a list of other ingredients), and while I didn’t make it, it did sound good to me. And the idea stayed in my brain…which brings me to yogurt.

While I can eat yogurt, I don’t particularly enjoy it—I’d rather just cook with it. I had bought a container of yogurt for a specific recipe, but had quite a bit left over and I didn’t know what to do with it. I recalled that cheesy gochujang pasta and thought I could just substitute the milk with yogurt to create a creamy sauce. So I did, and I liked it. It’s a quick recipe and takes about fifteen minutes to do.

CREAMY GOCHUJANG PASTA
1 serving

Ingredients
1 bacon strip
1 tbsp gochujang
1/8 tsp ground ginger
1/8 tsp ground garlic
2 tbsp water
¼ cup chopped kimchi
1 tbsp whole milk plain yogurt
1 serving angel hair pasta

— 1 —
In a nonstick frying pan, fry bacon. Once bacon is cooked, remove bacon from the pan and place on a paper towel to drain the excess grease. Keep the bacon grease in pan.

Once cool, break bacon into pieces.

— 2 —
Meanwhile, cook pasta according to directions. And drain pasta once cooked.

— 3 —
Add the water, gochujang, ground ginger, ground garlic and kimchi to the pan with the bacon grease. Over low heat, stir to combine.

— 4 —
Add the yogurt to the pan and stir to combine with the sauce. Add pasta to the pan and stir until coated with the sauce.

— 5 —
Place pasta on a plate and top with bacon pieces. Serve immediately.

Variation: Cheese
I also tried this replacing the bacon with cheese—mozzarella or cheddar works well. Cut a slice of cheese into 16 squares. In Step 5, once the sauce coats the pasta, add the cheese squares. Stir to combine as the cheese melts. Serve immediately.

Vintage Chinese Cookbook

I have a weakness for vintage cookbooks. I picked up this Chinese cookbook at an estate sale for $1. You can tell it was well-used, as the tape doesn’t even hold it together anymore. The cookbook was created by Benedictine nuns; this one is from 1960 (but the first printing was in 1956).

The book is divided by protein (so there’s beef, pork, chicken, seafood, vegetables, desserts and miscellaneous sections). I love the illustrations. They’re awesome—so cute and so many of them. Every page has as an illustration, and I can only imagine how much time it took to create these drawings.

As for the recipes themselves, I haven’t cooked any of them. Some are familiar recipes (like chow mien) and some I’ve never heard of before.

Another interesting thing is that some of the pages have Chinese proverbs relating to food and eating. Some are rather amusing.

Sweet and Spicy Calendar Card

I almost didn’t make any holiday-related design for this year. Thanksgiving rolled around and I hadn’t done anything (and was feeling rather uninspired and lazy). So I was on the fence on creating anything…but then I decided to just do it. Make something. I wanted to make something simple and useful—so I made a calendar recipe card.

I chose four recipes from blogs that I thought would be fairly easy for anyone to make (and would hopefully appeal to most palates). Admittedly, I haven’t made all of the recipes myself, but I trust that they’re delicious. I realized that they were all either sweet or spicy recipes and decided that that would be the theme for the card.

I wanted the card to be fun and have a slight retro vibe with the type and color. The only art I really did was the cover—I had to draw that by hand. It didn’t come together quite as quickly as I would have liked (it practically never does), but overall it didn’t take too long. A couple of hours here and there (and there) and it was done.

I also created a bellyband as my “tag” so I could put the recipient’s name on it. It also has a correlating message on it that ties in with the card itself.