I cooked this soup on April 16, 2020 — the start of second month of COVID lockdown. Buying cooking ingredients was problematic, but there was a Korean mini-grocery that stayed open and delivered to our doorstep.
Truth be told, I wasn’t a fan of Korean food at that point. But my daughters, Korean food fans long before that, weren’t worried that only mostly Korean cooking ingredients were available to us. Part of me was worried because meat at the Korean mini-grocery was pricey. We had better not be wasteful with whatever ingredients we could get.
Alex, my younger daughter, started learning to make kimchi. I started acquaint myself with Korean ingredients (never mind if I couldn’t pronounce them correctly) and how to use them properly. Frozen fish cake was among those ingredients that I learned to cook into complete dishes.
At that time, I had eaten fish cake only once in my life. Sam, my older daughter, and I were at the night market in Hanoi, there was street food galore, she ordered something that came in a plastic cup with a bamboo skewer for piercing whatever was in the cup. I asked her what it was, she said it was odeng — something she used to eat in college. She gave me a piece to taste and I remember that the sauce was too spicy for my taste buds.
A year later, I was looking at frozen fish cakes and wondering how to cook them minus the too spicy sauce. After sourcing recipes from reputable bloggers, I learned. This soup was the second fish cake dish I cooked. The recipe screams lockdown all over. Just see my best effort to not be wasteful.
Ingredients
- 1 packet instant ramen seasoning powder
- 1 large sweet potato peeled and cut into two-inch cubes
- ½ cup kimchi cut up with the juices (measure after cutting)
- 2 fish cakes cut into bite-size pieces
- ½ packet chili paste from a pack of Korean instant noodles
- fish sauce to taste
Instructions
- Boil three cups of water in a sauce pan.
- Stir in the seasoning powder.
- Drop in the kimchi (with the juices) and sweet potato cubes.
- Cover the pan and simmer for five to seven minutes.
- Stir in the fish cakes and spice paste.
- Simmer for another two to three minutes.
- Taste and add fish sauce, if needed.
- Garnish with scallion slices before serving.
More recipes with fish cakes
Korean stir fried fish cakes (odeng)
If you’ve never had Korean fish cakes before, this easy and quick-cooking dish should be a good introduction.
Oden
A Samurai Gourmet-inspired dish, our version of oden is a fusion of Japanese and Korean.
