Korean Foodie Treats @ Cubao Food Market

Hello blogosphere!

I'ts been so long since I posted - a year has passed by already (gasp!). The holidays kept me busy organizing stuff around the house and I'm glad to report that we're about 80% complete. So aside from organizing little by little, my new motto at home is "Out with the old, in with the new." 

To fulfill this new guideline for stuff we keep around the house, I've purged some stuff and given some of them away. Some of them had sentimental value but then the memories would always be with me anyway so the physical stuff can go.

Anyway, on to the topic of this post.

I recently got a new job and it sometimes requires me to go out and meet clients. One of the perks of this job is that I get to enjoy exploring new stuff like food and of course, window shopping. I'm also glad to say that I have a partner to work with and that we agree on a lot of things especially on food trips and shopping adventures.

In one of our field sessions, we found ourselves in Gateway, Cubao at night where there just happened to be an extended run of last year's food market. So we went around and found several stalls offering mostly regular fare and then we came across this Korean food stall which immediately attracted our attention.

We were both curious about these morsels and so we made our selection to taste most of them as our budget can afford. I wish I could see this stall in the TechnoHub food market so I could visit more often and really get to know what each one of these morsels is called. All I remember are some of the names of the things we ate and that we'd be happy to try them again.

Here's a closer look at their tasty menu. The ones on a stick were mostly seafood made from crab meat, salmon, fish cake and some tofu as well. Each shape has a different ingredient. I think the white balls with red specks at the bottom of the stick are crab meat while the topmost balls were made from salmon. The squared ones had tofu in them and the marshmallow-looking ones were ddukbokki.

I have always wanted to try bibimbap and I was glad they had it too. A whole roll costs about P100 but you can order half so that's what we did. They also had fish cake soup which had tofu, lots of veggies and what looked like glass noodles.

 

This is how it was served. You had a choice of spicy sauce, sweet sauce, sweet and spicy and I saw several other jars with different colors for sauces. There was the usual soy sauce and there was also a green sauce which I wanted to taste but wasn't able to request.

The bibimbap was definitely refreshing to the palate after tasting all the other savory food that we ordered. I would have wanted to order the fish cake soup but we we're already full.

These one's were dumplings in two varieties, one vegetarian and the other one made with veggies and beef. A nice aspect of all this foodstuff was that even though they were re-fried to heat them up, they didn't taste oily at all. Maybe it's because it's seafood, or maybe it's the oil they use, or maybe it's the sauce but it just made it taste healthier than your regular fried street food.

Our assorted seafood treats on a stick now already sliced for easy eating. We got the sweet and spicy sauce because I liked sweet and my partner liked spicy. Their sweet sauce was a little bit spicy already so I didn't dare touch the spicy sauce. 

The best part of this foodie treat was that aside from being very flavorful, they were also very affordable and the portions were just the right size for the price. The dumplings for example costs around P30 or P20 each with the vegetarian version being cheaper. The treats on barbecue sticks costs about P60 each stick so with only P200.00, we were able to enjoy our Korean dinner. They had Korean ice cream in different brands too. :-)