Kimchi Soup with Tuna

I stumbled into this recipe via Google when trying to find creative ways to dispose of a kilo of kimchi, and it certainly is a creative thing to do to a can of tuna as well. Fortunately, it's pretty good student food (at least if you love kimchi), so here is the mildly tweaked recipe:

Kimchi Soup with Tuna (Kimchi Chamchi Chigae)

Ingredients

• 2 cups of kimchi
  • if it's a little past the Best Before date, even better!
• 1 can of tuna in oil or water
  preferably a slightly better brand of whole tuna, not flakes
• 1 green onion
• 2 cloves of garlic, chopped
• 1 tsp chopped ginger
• 1 tsp fish sauce (nam pla, nuoc mam, etc)
• sesame oil

Instructions

1. Cut kimchi and green onion into 2-inch lengths.
2. Open can of tuna and drain well.
3. In a soup pot, fry kimchi, tuna, garlic and ginger in sesame oil for around 5 minutes, or until "dry".
   • Warning: Stir-fried kimchi smells seriously funky. You have been warned.
4. Add 1.5 cups of water. Bring to boil.
5. Add fish sauce. Simmer for 20 minutes.
   • Warning: Boiling fish sauce also smells pretty funky. Ventilation is your friend.
6. Add green onion and serve.

Serves 2 (at best). To add bulk to the meal, serve the soup with plain white rice, and feel free to do as the Koreans do and spoon the rice into the soup itself. The end result is supposed to be spicy, so add in chili powder or paste if your kimchi isn't fiery enough as is.

The base of the dish, kimchi chigae, is a well-known Korean dish, so there are plenty of substitutes for the canned tuna. Fresh fish might not be bad, although taste of the kimchi is overpowering enough to make it a bit of a waste; more traditional recipes tend to use meat and tofu.

The Original

http://www.geocities.com/ypmljulia/images/Soup(Chigae)/kimchi_soup.htm
(featuring lots of other variations on the kimchi-and-canned-tuna theme as well!)