kitchen firsts: cucumber kimchi + kimchi fried rice

I hope you will forgive me for going a little Korean crazy these last two weeks. It really would’ve been better to spread the Korean kitchen firsts out a little more over the course of the year, but you see last week I was inspired by the desire to make a tasty burger and the newfound love of gochujang sauce, and then I went to Portland and got an awesome new Korean cookbook at Powell’s and I just couldn’t resist making both the Kimchi Fried Rice and the Cucumber Kimchi right away! Please indulge me, or better yet, jump on board and get some more Korean food into your life!

kitchen firsts: pearl barley with mushrooms, cauliflower, and pancetta

I had actually planned on cooking something else for this week’s kitchen first, but this dish arose out of one of those quintessential “uuggh what are we going to have for dinner tonight?” moments when you have a seemingly weird collection of leftover ingredients and don’t know what to do with them. As it turned out, our little experiment mixing barley with cauliflower, pancetta, mushrooms, and parmesan turned out really well. It was as simple to throw together as a pasta dish, but the barley’s soft yet crunchy texture gave it a surprising new dimension, and the combination of mushrooms, pancetta, and cauliflower complemented the flavor of the barley very well.

Using pearl barley for a kitchen first struck me as a little boring at first, especially because until this point my only experience with barley has been in soups. While barley is certainly pleasant enough in that context, it’s nothing to write home about. But I assure you that if you take some of these nutty little nuggets out of the soup pot, and serve them up with mushrooms, onions, garlic, pancetta, and cheese, it becomes the complete opposite of boring.