Nothing like this…

We have rice cakes here or what we call “pek koi“…

…but ours is nothing like this, the Korean ones with the same name, rice cakes but tteokbokki in their language…

For one thing, the shapes are different. Ours is flat, rectangular with rounded semicircular ends while theirs is cylindrical like the Italian macaroni minus the hole in the middle.

My girl got to try the authentic Korean ones when she went over on a holiday with her mum a few years back and she missed eating it. We have one very nice Korean restaurant here but I don’t know if they have this on their menu – we have not gone there for years now, not since the outbreak of the pandemic. That was why when my girl saw them selling those rice cakes at a supermarket here, she wasted no time at all in grabbing a pack to cook her own herself.

She also bought this…

…from that same supermarket to cook the rice cakes with.

This is called maeli sauce…

…specially meant for stir frying those Korean rice cakes, according to the information at the back of the packet. To me, it is actually some kind of chili paste, something like their gochujang (Korean chili paste) and yes, it is a little spicy. It seems that they do have the non-spicy version and the ramyeon version that they call robokki, as well.

I don’t know what my girl did exactly as I did not stick around to watch but I know for a fact that she added some gourmet sausages, sliced fish cake and seafood tofu and she sprinkled a whole lot of toasted sesame seeds over it before serving. She could have added some chopped spring onion as well for a bit of colour. As it was, it looked more or less like many Korean dishes, their kim chi, for instance, in appearance, probably because of the chili paste.

I did try a bit and yes, I thought it was nice. My girl said that she was thinking of adding some quail eggs too but we did not have any in the fridge. She should have told me and I could have hopped over to one of the neighbourhood shops in the next lane to grab a packet (of 30).

TA KIONG EMPORIUM (2.2933,111.82713,783) is located in the town centre at No. 42-46, Jalan Tuanku Osman.