Bibimbap 'Til You Drop

My first attempt at bibimbap - pile it all together
on some rice and add a fried egg. Yum!

I am embarrassed to confess that my first taste of Korean food was not at the famous Woo Lae Oak in Tysons Corner, or even the Korean Deli in Fairfax. My first taste of Korean food was actually a frozen dinner from Trader Joe's. I'm not sure why Korean restaurants haven't made it to mainstream America the way that other Asian cuisines like Thai, Chinese, and Japanese have, but somehow it's taken me 30++ years to give it a go. The verdict? It was, um, actually pretty delicious. Delicious enough that it has spawned a temporarily all-consuming weekend quest for me and my husband to find the perfect NoVA bibimbap (traditional Korean dish of rice, mixed vegetables and meat, usually beef, topped with a fried egg).

Over the past few months we have eaten bibimbap at the mall, we have eaten bibimbap at a place called Myung-Ga Gim Bop (or as it says from the outside, "Korean Deli"), and we have eaten bibimbap at a place in Annandale that is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week where the servers wear traditional Korean dress and the menus are 10 pages long and haven't been wiped down since they opened. We have asked every Korean friend and acquaintance we have for advice on where to go, and we have subjected our poor children to many, many difficult meals. For some reason, they are not as concerned as we are about finding the best bibimbap in driving distance from our house.

I wondered if we might have a problem, but then a recent issue of Bon Appetit had a feature on making bibimbap for a large group, so I knew that if we did indeed have a problem, at least we weren't the only ones.  The Bon Appetit recipe calls for grated Asian pear, which is not easy to find all the time unless you go to the Korean grocery stores, but the idea of making it at home had me hooked. I scoured my favorite food sites and came up with this recipe at Allrecipes that looked pretty simple and delicious. It was really easy to make, and the best part? The marinade of the beef has so much brown sugar in it that it caramelizes when you cook it, giving it a rich, sweet taste and perfectly crispy and chewy texture - a lot like the Szechuan Beef Proper at another favorite Asian restaurant - Peking Gourmet. Mmm... Now I'm thinking about Peking Duck. I wonder how hard it is to make a good Peking Duck at home?