- Jan 2, 2006
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I'm not sure if Japanese or Korean households even do this, but thought I'd ask.
Lots of Japanese or Korean restaurants give you 8+ different little side dishes to have with your main meal. These are always really small, like one potato cut up into several pieces. And all the side dishes are different but equally as small.
Do actual households do this for family meals, or is this only a restaurant thing?
From a home cook perspective, this would appear to be incredibly difficult to do, especially if you're living by yourself or only have a small nuclear family of 3 or 4. There's no way a single home cook can make the following distinct and separate side dishes for three people at each meal:
Three potatoes cooked one way.
Half a cucumber in another way.
A quarter of a pumpkin.
A pint of macaroni salad.
A quarter of a an eggplant.
A quarter of a daikon, shredded.
A handful of seasoned soybean sprouts.
A cup of cooked spinach.
etc.
Plus the main entree.
It's just too much work to make so many small dishes for so few people. Compare this to a typical western meal which would be a main protein, a starch, and zero to two vegetable sides.
The only conceivable methods to be able to do this at home is to:
- buy a lot of these things canned and use as you go
- make a "normal" amount of each dish (ex. a whole eggplant and nine potatos) and then store them in the fridge and use them across the following three or four days, but this means the food is rarely fresh except for on the first day
What do traditional Japanese or Korean households do?
EDIT
The reason why I ask this is because I'm trying to take care of my mom who just had surgery. She is extremely traditional Chinese and has a very very very narrow array of foods that she will eat, and almost all of them must be homemade. To call her "picky" is a massive understatement.
She comes from a huge family and growing up she would have family meals consisting of 8-10 different dishes. For a huge family this level of variety is achievable.
We've only got three people in our family - my mom, dad, and me - and my mom is out of action.
If we give her four different dishes she will lose her appetite and literally only eat a mouthful of each dish or even less, and on top of that she'll complain that the nutrition isn't "complete" because you can only have complete nutrition when you've got a wide variety of different foods, the whole rainbow of colors, yadda yadda
When we put in the work and crank out 8-10 different dishes for a single meal, she'll eat a mouthful or two of each dish. But she loses her appetite in the following days because we're just eating the leftovers from the 8-10 dishes that we made previously. Cooking and sourcing all the different ingredients for her is literally a full time job. My dad is in the kitchen all hours of the day, cleaning veggies, prepping, cooking, etc. My dad and I have to find a better way to do this. My mom doesn't care - all she knows is that if she sees only four different dishes she won't feel like eating, especially if one of the dishes turns out to be subpar.
An example of dishes in just ONE meal:
- Chinese stir fried tomatoes and eggs
- boiled gai lan with garlic
- stir fried bok choy
- stir fried bean sprouts
- stir fried spinach
- stir fried bitter melon
- stir fried bean curd with julienned pork and ginger
- red-cooked braised pork (hong shao rou)
- steamed fish
- white rice
Just the time spent washing and picking out the dead leaves from all the different veggies is time consuming. And then we end up with massive amounts of leftovers that no one wants to eat after a day or two and a lot of waste and we end up cooking more food even on the days we have tons of leftovers (that no one wants to eat anymore).
Lots of Japanese or Korean restaurants give you 8+ different little side dishes to have with your main meal. These are always really small, like one potato cut up into several pieces. And all the side dishes are different but equally as small.
Do actual households do this for family meals, or is this only a restaurant thing?
From a home cook perspective, this would appear to be incredibly difficult to do, especially if you're living by yourself or only have a small nuclear family of 3 or 4. There's no way a single home cook can make the following distinct and separate side dishes for three people at each meal:
Three potatoes cooked one way.
Half a cucumber in another way.
A quarter of a pumpkin.
A pint of macaroni salad.
A quarter of a an eggplant.
A quarter of a daikon, shredded.
A handful of seasoned soybean sprouts.
A cup of cooked spinach.
etc.
Plus the main entree.
It's just too much work to make so many small dishes for so few people. Compare this to a typical western meal which would be a main protein, a starch, and zero to two vegetable sides.
The only conceivable methods to be able to do this at home is to:
- buy a lot of these things canned and use as you go
- make a "normal" amount of each dish (ex. a whole eggplant and nine potatos) and then store them in the fridge and use them across the following three or four days, but this means the food is rarely fresh except for on the first day
What do traditional Japanese or Korean households do?
EDIT
The reason why I ask this is because I'm trying to take care of my mom who just had surgery. She is extremely traditional Chinese and has a very very very narrow array of foods that she will eat, and almost all of them must be homemade. To call her "picky" is a massive understatement.
She comes from a huge family and growing up she would have family meals consisting of 8-10 different dishes. For a huge family this level of variety is achievable.
We've only got three people in our family - my mom, dad, and me - and my mom is out of action.
If we give her four different dishes she will lose her appetite and literally only eat a mouthful of each dish or even less, and on top of that she'll complain that the nutrition isn't "complete" because you can only have complete nutrition when you've got a wide variety of different foods, the whole rainbow of colors, yadda yadda
When we put in the work and crank out 8-10 different dishes for a single meal, she'll eat a mouthful or two of each dish. But she loses her appetite in the following days because we're just eating the leftovers from the 8-10 dishes that we made previously. Cooking and sourcing all the different ingredients for her is literally a full time job. My dad is in the kitchen all hours of the day, cleaning veggies, prepping, cooking, etc. My dad and I have to find a better way to do this. My mom doesn't care - all she knows is that if she sees only four different dishes she won't feel like eating, especially if one of the dishes turns out to be subpar.
An example of dishes in just ONE meal:
- Chinese stir fried tomatoes and eggs
- boiled gai lan with garlic
- stir fried bok choy
- stir fried bean sprouts
- stir fried spinach
- stir fried bitter melon
- stir fried bean curd with julienned pork and ginger
- red-cooked braised pork (hong shao rou)
- steamed fish
- white rice
Just the time spent washing and picking out the dead leaves from all the different veggies is time consuming. And then we end up with massive amounts of leftovers that no one wants to eat after a day or two and a lot of waste and we end up cooking more food even on the days we have tons of leftovers (that no one wants to eat anymore).
Last edited:
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