[Pre-180, My SJI Days] Cooking Korean Rice Cake with Korea Club (KCC) Friends at SJI Carnival 2014

During my days in SJI KCC, our group of KCC friends also signed up for a stall at the 2014 SJI Carnival to sell Spicy Korean Rice Cakes (Ttebokki). (Ps: That was around early March 2014. :) )

As most of us are only familiar with eating ttebokki but not actually cooking it, we had learn how to cook this traditional Korean dish. As such, I approached the lady boss (Jung Ran-ssi) of the Korean Restaurant, Hansik Restaurant (the restaurant which I frequently patronise), to ask for an opportunity to learn how to cook rice cakes from her.

After communicating to her about the SJI charity carnival and our 'ambition' to sell ttebokki in my broken Korean, I sent her an email to reconfirm our intention.

And she replied yes!

So on 31^st of March all 10 of the KCC members went to her restaurant during the staff break time to learn more about how to cook ttebokki. Not only did Jung Ran ssi demonstrate to us how to cook the rice cakes, she also gave us a detailed printout of the recipe. Not to forget, all of us also get to enjoy the pot of rice cakes she cooked for us during the demonstration. Needless to say, it was really yummy—and of course free food for once.

We later went on to plan out what ingredients to buy and decided to order about $60 worth of rice cakes, fish cakes and spicy rice cake sauce from Jung Ran ssi.

The following week's Friday—after SJI Founder’s Day celebrations (one day before SJI Carnival), we went on to Jung Ran ssi’s restaurant to collect our ingredients. We too went on to NTUC Fairprice to buy other ingredients such as cabbages, carrots and leek. 

A tryout session and a pre-cooking preparation session is a must. So back at my place, we cut up all the fish cakes, leek, and carrots and put them into plastic containers to use it for the carnival the next day. A trial was also carried out to test out the cooking using an induction heater and to gauge how the food will taste. 

On the actual SJI Carnival on 5^th of April, we went on to cook our ttebokki and it received rather good response! We sold it at $2 with a cup of complimentary tea (of which was sponsored by our KCC friend Ruo Xuan—she can’t finish it ^-^) and many friends and family came in to support us.

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We had a great time selling food that day, and we sold all of our rice cakes ahead of time despite some minor hiccups such as power failure at the canteen in the middle of the carnival.

It was overall a fun and enjoyable experience! ^-^