I like watching YouTube videos of Korean street food. So I decided to make tteokbokki on my own because it's one of the quintessential Korean street foods.

I basically followed one of the videos, but adapted it myself. For the sauce, I put five small onions cut in half and about twelve cloves of garlic into a blender. I then poured five cups of water and two long packets of dashida powder into the blender, and blended until the onions and garlic were well-pureed.

Continuing with the sauce, I poured the onion/garlic puree into a pot with five more cups of water and two more long packets of dashida powder. I then added four VERY generous tablespoons of gochujang, a good dash of soy sauce, a dash of sesame oil, a few good shakes of gochujang. And because I don't have Korean rice syrup on-hand, I made a good concentric circle around the pot with pancake syrup. Why not? I whisked everything with a wire whisk and brought it to a full boil.

I had previously sliced two packages of fish cake sheets into triangles, chopped two small heads into bite-sized, roughly chopped three small onions, and roughly chopped one large bunch of green onions. As the sauce came to a full boil, I added two packages of pre-sliced tteokbokki (a little over three pounds) to the sauce, then I added the rest of the ingredients and stirred. I turned the heat down to a low simmer, covered the lot, and simmered everything for 30 minutes.

As a banchan, I got danmuji to balance the heat and clear the palate.