Feeding My Passion

(My boss gave me an small assignment to write a single paragraph on Korean food.)

Before I came to Korea, I had eaten some Korean food. I had a Korean friend in college who took me out to the only Korean restaurant in our small college town in Missouri. It must have been unremarkable food by his standards, but for him, it was a taste of home, and I’m sure he ate there often. To me, Korean food was very different from the Chinese food I grew up eating in California. And it was delicious. In America, Korean food is still not well know outside of the major cities – you really have to seek it out, and I did sometimes. Pajeon, galbi, and of course, more kimchi. Compared to Western food, the most common flavors in Korean food are amazing and some of my favorites: toasted sesame oil, garlic, scallions, and chili powder. Before I came in June 2010, I had eaten more Korean food than most Americans whose parents aren’t Korean. But I was completely unprepared for the incredible variety of food and strength of the food culture here. For someone who enjoys eating with the seasons, Korea is great. Korean strawberries, your incredibly flavorful, soft, and delicious strawberries, show up in Spring, and you can’t find them again until the next Spring. Waiting is difficult, but they’re worth the wait. I could return to Korea every Spring for the rest of my life just for the strawberries. I could go on and on about so many fruits and vegetables here, not just how delicious they are, but that so many Korean know what province grows the best melons, what city makes the best dried fish, or what province has the best food overall, Jeolla-do obviously. And the food is so regional. There are five galbi restaurants on every block in Gyeonggi-do, for example, but they’re not as common as you travel south. And try finding moju, Gyeongju’s sweet and spiced version of makgeolli, in this area. Every area makes their own version of makgeolli! Kimchi is very regional as well, some places use shrimp sauce, some use anchovy sauce, some add squid and oysters, some use none. And I’m just talking about cabbage kimchi! I’ve actually made kimchi, six different types so far. But that is the tip of a very large iceberg. One of the first things foreigners learn is that kimchi isn’t just made from cabbage. I’ve been to the kimchi museum in Coex Mall, and they say there are over 170 types of kimchi! 170!! I like studying how weather and culture has influenced what people eat, and Korea is a great example of how people have adapted to the long, cold winters by preserving food without refrigeration. Kimjang, the kimchi making time of the year in early Winter, was, and still is, a remarkable family and community effort to make an important food that sustains Korean through the Winter. I’ve learned that you have to use mature kimchi to make kimchi stew, and that there are two different words for rice, ssal for raw, and bap for cooked. And I’ve learned so much more, but I still am just a baby when it comes to knowing Korean food. Not only is it delicious, but the culture and history of Korean food is incredible as well. I still have so much to learn, and my Korean friends have been very generous with their time, knowledge, and skills to help me learn more about their remarkable food.

Food is a lot of things to a lot of people. For those who don’t have much of it, it’s critical. In fact, besides breathing and sleeping, it’s the only other thing we have to do to stay alive. Because of the circumstances of my life, lack of food has never been even a consideration for me.

For many other, food is fuel. Or pleasure (I raise my hand.) Or community. Or heritage. Or memory. Or therapy (ok, my hand has to go up again.) Or tourism (me again). It’s work, for everyone, whether you get directly paid to do it, even when we love to do it.

And food is gratitude. I feel it means more when you make food rather than buy it, but I like cooking more than most people, so that feeling would be self-serving. But I still think it’s true.

Food is also geography and culture, and history. And migration, economic trade, and craft. It can even be art. With vegetariansim and veganism, the natural, locavore, and organic food movements (they’re not necessarily the same thing, though there is some overlap among them), food can also be philosophy. Food is one of every human being’s most basic needs, though we can make it as complex or as simple as we want it to be or when we have the means.

I’d really love to read a lot more about food and I have a pretty long Amazon wish list (this is not a hint, this is merely my way of collecting books I’d like to read later) of food history- and anthropology-related books that beckon me. It’s clear I’m not alone in my interest.

It’s difficult to hate LA, at least it has been for me lately. It was not always so.

I grew up coming here with some frequency for a couple reasons, mainly because I had family in Van Nuys and La Habra. The other reason was, of course, Disneyland. All good Christian families would travel through the most depraved place on earth to reach the Magic Kingdom[TM]. Which, of course, is what LA is, or at least represents for much of the world and even the US. Even northern Californians. Maybe especially us, or them, whatever. I don’t think the Mason-Dixon line is in any danger of losing its status for top geographical rivalry in the US, but northern Cali definitely isn’t a big fan of southern Cali. I think the funniest thing about this is that the south is generally oblivious to this rivalry, which means it’s not much of a rivalry, kind of like shadow-boxing really.

Anyway, it’s tough for me to hate LA. First, Kamila is here, so I can’t possibly be grumpy about spending time here with her, wherever we may be, even here. And then I’ve just come from Korea, which just barely made it above freezing the entire month before I flew here. By contrast, the weather in LA is quite fantastic: warm (in the 70s), sunny, and light breezes. Hard to hate that.

The food, for me, is another reason to soak up as much LA as possible. The diversity of cuisine and its general tastiness are all positives. Little Ethiopia has 8 Ethiopian restaurants in a single block! (It’s a micro-neighborhood though, not much more than a block long.) The diversity of the people, in all their creative wildness, is fun and energetic to be around. Hand-in-hand with the diversity and wacky energy of the Los Angelenos, plus the food, is the number of distinct neighborhoods: K(orea)-Town, Little Tokyo, West Hollywood’s Eastern European/Jewish community, Little Saigon, Chinatown, Thai Town (the only one in the world), multiple Mexican areas (including one with a Mariachi Plaza where  you can pick up a band for a party, just bring a van to carry them and the guitars!), and so on and so on. I could grow old trying to list all the distinct ethnic neighborhoods in LA, so I’ll just have others do the heavy lifting. I haven’t spent time exploring NY City, but I’m sure it’s the same way, but without LA’s really nice weather. That goes double for Chicago. Maybe triple.

Venice Beach is a the flagship for crazy and diverse (and medical marijuana), its houses, especially along the canals (from whence it got its name), are gems of residential architecture. In fact, many area in LA have really interesting and beautiful homes. I’ve been gawking at the many, many beautiful and interesting houses in Hollywood Hills and West Hollywood where I’ve been hanging out the last couple weeks.

With all this talk about interesting food from around the world and beautiful homes (which doesn’t mean huge homes, but this is a very expensive real estate market), this isn’t exactly a post about social justice or income equality. The post is a counter-balance to the northern California prejudice that its southern brethren are without culture. I won’t say that LA is a bastion of culture like New York, Paris, Rome, London, wherever. Actually I will say it, it really is.

There, now I’ve gone and completely betrayed my heritage. Happy now? Of course I am, I’m in sunny LA!

Food journalism as a career? Maybe, maybe. What’s particularly interesting for me is that my father spent most of his professional life as a agricultural journalist, which is certainly food journalism. Strangely enough, while agriculture is the foundation of food journalism, it’s now considered only one part of a much larger whole.

There are chemical companies which are creating “food” and flavor; there are other chemical companies genetically engineering crops, which medium- and long-term seem not be worth the short-term benefit they confer; we have a populace, at least in the US, and maybe increasingly so everywhere else in the first world, that is becoming more and more distant from the origins of their food, both physically and mentally; a political system that seems to be completely in the pocket of the companies that make the aforementioned “food” and genetically-enhanced crops to the detriment of our health; and environmental issues which threaten our food supply. I see those as just the main challenges facing food, and there are many more lesser ones.

On the flip side, there’s also a movement to remedy all of those things:  a group of people who are dedicated to the creation and preservation of small, honest, un-enhanced farming and ranching; they exist because there is also a group of consumers, led by chefs and other highly food-interested people who insist on more honest food and who believe that “bigger”, “faster”, and “longer-lasting” aren’t the most important synonyms we can apply to our food and animal crops; lots of non-professionals who cook and blog who are strong advocates for a greater connection to our food and for preserving food culture; and environmentalists who aren’t just worried about how many of us will get skin cancer or the implications of rising sea levels, but also about how the depreciation of our environment threatens our food supply. Since the only things we need to do to stay alive are eat and breathe, it’s an excellent idea for scientists to focus their research efforts and advocacy toward perpetuating the health of our food supply.

So a food writer’s knowledge, e.g. Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, encompass a huge landscape of extreme depth and breadth. It might be an interesting job.

On Saturday, November 27th, I made the majority of a Thanksgiving dinner for all the foreigners Chris and I thought might like to come, and invited some Koreans as well. How many almost doesn’t matter, though I think there were about 35 people there at the peak.

The part of the menu I worked on was pretty traditional: Turkey, bread and walnut stuffing, gravy, roasted red bell pepper dip, and blueberry relish. Well, ok, blueberry relish isn’t exactly tradition. But it’s in the mix because when you’re trying to make the Thanksgiving classics outside of the US, it can be challenging to find all the traditional stuff. I don’t know about the rest of Asia, but S. Korea doesn’t make it easy.

First, what else, the turkey. While Koreans eat all manner of flying, crawling, walking, and swimming beasts, turkeys aren’t one of them. Chris, soon to be leaving Korean (and returning in the Spring) came up with the idea for the dinner, and since he knows I used to cook professionally and still like to cook, he asked me if I wanted to do something. Why yes, that’s a dandy idea!

Fortunately he has a Costco membership. There are seven (!!) locations in S. Korea, and we took a couple buses to the very popular (re: extremely crowded) Yang-jae location. It was a lot like any of US locations, except for the cool shopping-cart escalators and stuff like squid and shrimp pizza and 40 pound tubs of Korean chili paste (go-chu-jang). In the meat department, the frozen turkeys weren’t easy to find, and there’s wasn’t a dazzling array of them: One brand, maybe six birds total. I snatched one, and at least the most difficult ingredient to source was out of the way.

Of course, I only picked up a turkey because I had an oven that could actually fit a bird of that size. A toaster oven is the most that you see here, there’s just not a lot of use for a full-sized Western-style oven. Ovens, outside of restaurants, are uncommon in the Far East, since the cuisine doesn’t require them. And it takes a lot of energy/fuel to heat a larger oven. It’s almost a chicken-or-the-egg sort of question, but my money is on fuel/energy use as a major reason for the cuisine’s obvious lack of baked foods.

Let me correct myself, one of the foreign teachers told us they had a “real” oven we could use for the Thanksgiving meal, but neither Chris nor I got a look at it until I picked it up on the Wednesday night before the dinner, which was on Saturday evening.

I held back tears when I saw the oven. It was a glorified toaster oven. And to really improve on the situation, I blew a fuse (I’m hoping) or something when I turned it on for the first time. Nice.

Luckily I could roast the almonds for the chocolate almond buttercrunch toffee in my toaster oven, albeit in a few batches given the size. But I would have to cut the turkey into teeny, tiny little pieces and roast it in 30 batches to cook it all. Not a good plan.

So, Korean friends to the rescue! I contacted Julie, who has quite a large apartment on the Dongtan/Byeongjeom border, and who showed me how to cook some Korean dishes a couple of weeks ago. I’d been over to her and her boyfriend’s place a few times, but I don’t specifically remember seeing an oven. Her kitchen is large and, being from the US, I just assumed a kitchen of that size would have an oven, of course! Nope, but her friend Hye-shin, who I’d met, did. Or more accurately, her mother did, and she, her husband, and their son lived with her mother. Her parents were going to be out of town on the 27th, the day of the dinner, so I had free reign in the kitchen. To guard against any major last-minute surprises, I asked her to measure the oven and tell me how big it was. It was big enough to fit the roasting pan I bought for the occasion. Yipee! I was breathing again.

It was critical that I break down the turkey for a couple of reasons, the two biggest being it was too damn tall and would take too long to bake, probably 3-4 hours. Cooking a broken-down turkey takes about 1 1/2 hours. Thankfully, it was pretty easy to break down. While I’m less squeamish than most when it comes to handling raw meat, it was still a slightly gruesome task, replete with lots of blood, cracking bones, cold, raw meat, and cutting stringy turkey skin. Yum. Generally people love eating meat, but they don’t want to prepare it or know how it was prepared before cooking it. Actually, that’s not at all accurate. Koreans, and I’m sure people from many other countries, are very realistic about what it takes to take meat from a live animal to a cooked (or uncooked) dish. It’s Westerners, and maybe Americans in particular, which are so disconnected from the source of their food. This is a common theme in the American eating mentality. But that’s a good subject for another post.

Obviously, after being broken down, the bird doesn’t take up a lot of space vertically, but horizontally, uh, yeah, a lot more. In fact it filled not only my roasting pan plus a half-pan (a large cookie sheet). The nice oven that I was going to use wasn’t big enough for both pans, so I choose to bake the breasts first since they had the most meat and I could hold off the hungry hoards with them while baking the legs and thighs. Or that was my plan. I’d have to figure out something as I went along.

Because Hye-shin looked at me after the breasts had been in her mother’s oven for about an hour and said, “I don’t think you will get the rest of the turkey done.” She was just saying what I was thinking, and reading the worried expression on my face every time I checked the turkey in the oven, which I needed to free up as soon as possible, and poked the nicely butter-and-spice rubbed turkey legs and thighs that were not-so-patiently waiting in the half pan on the kitchen table.

I neglected to mention that Matthew, my Korean brother (not really, but really) was over the night I blew the borrowed oven. He works a few different jobs, primarily as a guitar repairman, but also as a fast-food delivery driver. And by driver, I mean, scooter driver, I haven’t seen food delivered any other way in Korea. It’s done at top speed with zero  regard for anyone’s safety or for any traffic laws. Anyway, one of his most recent delivery gigs was for a chicken place that baked their birdie parts, and he told me that maybe he could ask them to roast my almonds. Since my almonds were roasted and nestled in the toffee, my panicked brain darted around for solutions, and latched onto Matthew’s oven offer. So I called him. He was working, but he agreed and ran over to Hye-shin’s apartment to pick up the legs and thighs.

He comes zooming up on his delivery scooter (his other scooter is a real motorcycle), grabs my bird, grabs a smoke, and zooms off after I tell him that I’ll stop by the chicken place in about 45 minutes, with my instant read electronic thermometer of course, to check on it. Matthew to the rescue! Again! (He’s worth at least a few posts.)

Feeling a lot better, I got back inside to check on the parts of the bird that were in the oven and to start getting ready to move out since all the sides were done by this point. We were snacking a bit on the candy, I have to admit, but there was over 2 pounds of it and we were showing remarkable restraint.

The turkey was finally done, I covered it with foil and we headed out the door. Young-ho, Hye-shin’s husband, pulled the car around. All 5 of us (the Kims, their two sons, Julie, and me) piled most of the food in the trunk and I sat with the very warm turkey on my lap for the short ride.

If you’ve done much catering, and I’ve done just a little (I’m not being modest, truly less than a dozen times I think), this type of craziness isn’t all that unusual, especially when you’re a beginner like I am. Even the pros expect the unexpected. And to use the cliché, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Same goes for working in a professional kitchen. Which I have a little more experience with, but not years and years, maybe just year and year.

The work was worth it. Everyone loved everything and were very grateful that Chris and I had gone to the trouble to put it all together, offer his apartment as the location, offer his 10 gallons of hard cider, and make the food. If turkey in any form was easy to find in Korea, they wouldn’t have gushed so much. But what we did, from buying the turkey to roasting it, was a big thing, and I was happy to bring Thanksgiving to some of my friends, and to their friends. I was grateful everyone enjoyed themselves and everything turned out so well.

Remind me to do a non-traditional Thanksgiving next year unless I have guaranteed access to couple of honkin’-big fryers. If so, bring on the bird!

Peace and mashed potatoes!

…is supposed to be in Joellanam-do, and I was really looking forward to going to the 17th annual Nando Food Culture Festival (site in Korean) at the Nando folk village in Suncheon, Jeollanam-do.

So Kelly picked me up from Osan Station at 6:25a, with her son (a student at You & I where she and I teach) sleeping in the van’s back seat, and we picked up Mr. X (name to come), his son (also a former student at You & I), and we headed for the festival.

Kelly and Mr. X took turns driving, and after a few hours, we stopped at  an unassuming little restaurant for breakfast. Most Korean restaurants are very short on decoration compared to restaurants in the west, but the lack of decor is no absolutely no indication of how good the kitchen is. This place is big, it was hopping, and it was difficult to find a table for the five of us. That’s a much better sign about how good the kitchen is.

Another thing about many restaurants here, they specialize in one thing or just a few. This place, as advertised on its sign out front, served kkongnamul gook bap, a variation on kkongnamul gook, soybean sprout soup, bap means that there’s rice in it as well.

It was awesome stuff, there were so many bean sprouts, they must buy them buy the ton, and they were so fresh, they must have gotten a delivery everyday.

Something interesting I hadn’t tried before, actually a couple things, but the first was that we all got a bowl with a raw egg, and a small package of gim (Korean seasoned and toasted seaweed). I watched Mr. X as he spooned some of the hot soup broth into the bowl and mixed it up, then crumbled the gim into the mixture, and began eating it. I followed suit, and it was delicious, definitely something I’ll try again, maybe even at home. So that’s why there was a huge stack of eggs in the dining room in front of the kitchen window, probably more than 2000 eggs total. (I haven’t seen refrigerated eggs anywhere since I’ve been here. I’ve bought a few dozen since July and haven’t suffered any problems. I do refrigerate mine once I get them home, just in case you’re wondering.)

So onto the soup! Delicious! A little spicy, light, clear. Believe it or not, the sprouts stay crunchy even though they’re cooked for about 20 minutes. It’s truly great breakfast food, a tie with my favorite breakfast food of all time, cold pizza (Hey, stop judging me!). Mr. X told me it was good after a night of too much soju (Korean wine, about 30-40 proof, made from rice and sweet potatoes) or maekju (beer – the “ju” part means alcohol, and although very similar to the Chinese word for alcohol, “jiu”, it has a different origin). I think the soup is just a great way to start the day, no matter how you’ve ended the previous one.

I saw that the waitresses were taking jugs of a milky brown liquid to some of the tables and asked Kelly what it was (her English is excellent, Mr. X’s is about as good as my Korean, which is to say, not very functional yet). She asked him, and then told me that it was a regional alcoholic drink called moju (there’s “ju” again) and he asked if I wanted to try some.

Drinking at 9:30a? Uh, sure, why not? I at least wanted to taste it, I haven’t even heard of it before, who knows when I’d a chance to try it again? So he ordered a bowl for me (the more rustic drinks, like moju and makkoli are are poured into bowls) and out it came, warm, brown, and cloudy. It smelled great, like cinnamon punch, and it tasted even better, thicker than water, sweet, and flavored with cinnamon and ginger. Fortunately the alcohol content was minimal. Kelly had never had it before (bear in mind she’s lived in Korea her entire life), and asked me for a taste. She quickly ordered a bowl for herself. Yes, it was that delicious. Which doesn’t mean I had another bowl, but if I have a chance to drink it again, I’ll jump.

Thoroughly fortified, we got back into the car and headed for out next destination, which wasn’t the food festival, but one of the most famous Son Buddhist (Zen in Japanese, Chan/Shaolin in Chinese, Mahayana in Sanskrit) temples in Korea.

It was still early, but I wondered if we’d ever get to the food festival with all these stops. But really, since I was with some new friends and eating so well, I wasn’t concerned. Let’s just keep eating our way across the province!

From Very Good Taste:

Here’s a chance for a little interactivity for all the bloggers out there. Below is a list of 100 things that I think every good omnivore should have tried at least once in their life. The list includes fine food, strange food, everyday food and even some pretty bad food – but a good omnivore should really try it all. Don’t worry if you haven’t, mind you; neither have I, though I’ll be sure to work on it. Don’t worry if you don’t recognise everything in the hundred, either; Wikipedia has the answers.

Here’s what I want you to do:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here atwww.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare [going to have the Korean version, yuk hoe (??)]
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho [duh!]
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut [does kimchi count too? I've had plenty of both, but am living in the land of kimchi right now]
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV [Hair of the Dog Brewery, how I love and miss thee]
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

That’s 59 out of 100 for me as of today. I may not make a lot of headway on this list while I’m in Korea, but I’m sure I could knock out the bugs, snake, and durian if I visit any country in SE Asia. And if I want to. None of the three fall under the heading of ”enticing”, but I’ve heard durian can be addictive, though incredibly stinky, the combination of those two things is why it made the list.

Some of them I’m looking forward to (#8, 17, 30, 36, 37, 43, 44, 46, 51, 53, 59, 64, 72, 80, 84, 90, 93, 99), one I’m glad to have behind me (#26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper definitely falls in that category, and I didn’t know enough about Scotch Bonnet peppers at the time to avoid eating it on someone’s suggestion. I recommend avoiding it.). Many of them I’ve had many times in the past and will hopefully eat them the rest of my life (#3, 10, 12, 14, 21, 24, 27, 29, 34, 54, 61, 67, 81, 95). I are more than a few I might pass up (6, 25, 38, 42, 62, 63, 68, 70, 75(!)).

Tuesday night, about 11:45p, Byeongjeom, South, Korea, a restaurant poetically named General Pee’s (yes, that’s Pee as in pee-pee) – The place is hopping, totally packed. Adam P. (no relation to General Pee), and I are looking around and we have the same thought, why on earth is a restaurant so busy so late on a weeknight? I haven’t spent any time in Spain, but I’ve heard that it’s similar to this, that the Spaniards also start eating (and drinking, and I’m not talking about soda) quite late, at least compared to the US. But during the week?

Matthew, our best Korean friend and the guy who’s treating us to this table-top grill meat-fest, says many of the people in the restaurant (and I’m assuming at the many, many nearby joints as well), don’t have to work tomorrow. I’d have to hear it from them to truly believe it, but I’ll take his word for it. Still, it’s amazing, the amount of food being eaten and beer and soju being consumed for a Tuesday night. We’re leaving at 11:45p and we’re leaving early, nobody else seems to be really ready to go.

It’s Matt’s first payday at his new job, and he’s treating us. I pour his soju, he pours our beer. He shovels another dozen slices of super thinly-sliced lean beef onto the blazingly-hot table-top grill (too many hyphens? probably). The three of us eat lustily. The beef is incredibly thin, in long, bacon-like strips. It must have been literally shaved off with a meat planer from a big block while it was very cold, the curls of meat are quite lovely. Once cooked, it’s melts in our mouths. Matthew calls it paper beef, though this isn’t a translation, just his poetic interpretation. Dipping the caramelized strips in the toasted sesame oil, salt, and pepper mixture we each get makes it that much better, so much better. The side dishes are good and fresh: cooked cabbage kimchi, green onion salad, green lettuce salad, macaroni salad (not kidding, and not bad), raw garlic slices, raw hot chili pepper slices, plain tofu, spicy bean paste sauce…have I left anything out? Oh, the ubiquitous soybean sprout soup, some sort of egg dish that comes to the table so insanely hot that it bubbles away for a few minutes after the server brings it to the table. Matthew knows I like doenjang jigae (soybean paste stew), so he buys a bowl of it for me and some rice as well. Groan…hope I can make it home without popping.

I’m so happy Korean food is generally very healthy, all except for the fried foods, and there’s none of that here. Oh I forgot a couple more side dishes: a very thinly sliced raw cabbage salad with a Chinese hot mustard dressing, and of course, fresh green leaf lettuce, to which we add a little grilled garlic, or maybe some green onion salad, or kimchi, and the grilled meat, before creating a little leafy, green bundle, and dipping it in the spicy bean paste sauce and popping it into our mouths. Like Vietnamese food, it’s a wonderful combination of flavors, textures, and temperatures, which is why I like Vietnamese, and now Korean food, so much.

We waddle outside and open our umbrellas which give us very little protection against the heavy summer rain. We’re full and fully satisfied, our happy glow a result of sharing a great meal with friends, knowing we have fully tasted everything offered and made the most of it.

Time for bed and to dream sweetly of my ever-present love, Kamila. If I’m really lucky, maybe I’ll catch her on Skype before I drift off.

Anne and Ryan mentioned, on several occasions, that oisobagi (aka oi kimchi, oi = cucumber) was probably their favorite kimchi when they got back from Asia. Since it’s a Summer kimchi because cucumbers are only in season during the Summer (the produce here is very seasonal, love that, at least it’s easy to love it because it’s Summer), I thought I’ve give it a try before the cucumbers became either 1) scarce or 2) expensive.

Rob T, another foreign English teacher who lives in Byeongjeom not too far away and I picked up 20 cukes and a few more ingredients since I already had most of them in my growing pantry. Oh, but first I had to find a good recipe for it. Not having a cookbook yet (I have 2 good ones on the way from What The Book out of Itaewon.), I did some research online and found one that struck me as the best one for me to do, lots of flavor, not too difficult, and scaling it (doubling in this case) was very easy.

So we shopped and sliced and brined, grated and chopped, measured and mixed, drained and rinsed, until everything was ready for the stuffing. As you can see, we did all the prep in my bedroom, on my bed and the floor since my kitchen really is very small and I don’t have a desk yet. Hopefully I’ll get one this week. But until then, improvisation has been key, and never more so than when making kimchi in my little place with my tiny little kitchen.

I’m looking forward to my next paycheck as well, which I’ll get on the 8th, so I can start doing some real cooking again. I mean, I love rice and tofu as much as the next person, of course, not if that person is Korean, in which case, I love it about half as much as they do. The subject of food comes up in class for a couple of reasons, one of them is our lessons at school often include something food-related. And I don’t exactly discourage any conversation about food. I’m curious what their favorite foods are, if they like to cook, if their parents (overwhelmingly their mother) are good cooks and what they cook. So I asked them what their favorite foods were. About half the class said rice was one of their top two. Rice! I don’t think I can imagine American kids telling me that bread or potatoes was in the top 5, or 10, or 20 even! The love for rice here is deep and strong.

Anyway, I do really like kimchi, tofu, and rice, but not quite like most Koreans do. Though I do like it a lot more than most non-Asian Americans.

To get my E-2 (work) visa, I flew to Guam last Wednesday since Guam is the nearest US territory, and got my work visa from the Korean consulate there. The immigration thing is kind of complicated, especially since the rules are always changing. Normally people go to Fukuoka, Japan, and that would have been my preference as well, since I’m planning on going to Japan at some point during the year. But the paperwork from the University of Missouri wasn’t perfectly in order, so I had to go to a Korean consulate in the nearest US territory. Fortunately I didn’t have to go back to the US!

Guam was interesting, and much more expensive than Korea. Because the Korean consulate closes at 5p, and I got off the plane Wednesday at 3:30, I jumped in a taxi to get over there quickly. The 10 minute ride was US$20. Visa: US$45. I called my resort from the consulate and asked when I could catch the next airport shuttle. The one I was supposed to be on (they knew when I was coming in) was the last one of the day. Great. Taxi to the resort: US$40 (the guy at the Korean consulate took pity on me, called another Korean he knows on Guam, and asked him to drive me for $40, otherwise a taxi to the resort would have been $50+. I Only came with $170, and I was going to be there for 4 days, so I started to think about what I was going to eat, and I don’t mean about the delicious variety that Guam has to offer, I was thinking about the most high-energy foods I could consume for the lowest price. Gotta say, cheese Spam is a little too salty for me, but washed down with one of the two free beers in my minibar (unfortunately both of them were Budwiser), it wasn’t too bad. So for the next few days I took the free resort shuttle to the big shopping areas and walked around a little, and ate some real food, Japanese ramen (not Korean ramyeon) on Thursday and Vietnamese lemongrass chicken on Friday. After a little shopping for Kamila, and a couple postcards, I was down to approximately $4, just enough for some more crappy food to get me through the next 24 hours before my plane left on Saturday afternoon. So I didn’t have anything to eat from Friday night until they served food on the airplane at about 5:30p on Saturday. I lost some weight.

Enough of that sad story, and it is sad, because there are a tremendous number of cuisines on the island, and it’s a beautiful place, so it would have been nice to do some interesting (not necessarily expensive) eating, see the beaches north and south of Tamuning, and do some exploring outside of the places where the transportation was free. I’ve got a lot of other places I want to see in Asia, but if I ever find myself back in Guam, I’ll bring a lot more money or a lot of reduced-sodium Spam.

It was funny, even though everyone on Guam spoke English very, very well, I couldn’t wait to get back to Korea, I feel much more at home here in Korea. It was a relief to make myself understood on Guam just by speaking complete sentences and not breaking out the English/Korean dictionary, but Korea is much more convenient and interesting to me. And plus, the jjimjilbangs. There’s a nice one a few blocks away from my apartment, and I’ve gone to it every week for the past month. Happiness.

Plus cooking for myself rocks! I usually wouldn’t cook for myself, but since I’m in a testing/experimental phase with the cuisine, I want to try cooking a couple new dishes every week. I haven’t perfected my vegetable pajeon yet, but I’m working on it. My dukbokki is pretty good, happy with that one. I made spicy myeulchi bokkem (stir-fried sardines) last week that turned out really well, and my sigeumchi namul (spinach with garlic, soy, and sesame oil) was pretty good too. I’m going to make some grilled mackerel this week. Once I get my first paycheck, I’m going to make some oisobaggi (cucumber kimchi) before I lose the season. And then some mul (water) kimchi. After a few batches of those, I’ll be happy to help someone make some of their Winter kimchi. Oh, there’s the big Namdo food festival in Jeollanam-do in October. Can’t miss that! My school’s Korean owner and the Korean teacher are just about ready to teach my classes for me and set up a kitchen at the school so I can cook for them. They find it quite funny that I’m so enthusiastic about cooking.

I haven’t been elbowed by any ajumans anywhere yet, although I took a pretty good bump on the bus from someone who I normally would have asked for an apology, but I understand it’s just probably par for the course here. No problem. I can understand some jostling in the stores though, those jujubes are big and beautiful! There are 3 supermarkets within about 6 blocks of my apartment, so I’m all good for food supplies.

Getting a netbook (I’m going to Yongsan electronics market the first weekend after I get my first paycheck) will let me play the yoga DVDs I brought, and that will be very nice. I’ll also be able to do some real blogging as well, which I’m really looking forward too. And since every laptop and netbook has a webcam, I’ll be able to Skype from my apartment, which will be wonderful. Right now, there’s a PC-bang that has webcams that I can use, and I’ve been using it everyday to talk with Kamila, which has been a true blessing, but it’s one of the few PC-bangs I’ve found that does have webcams. Fortunately it’s close and inexpensive.

There’s a nice park just a couple blocks away from my apartment that I had no idea was there until one of the other foreign teachers showed me last weekend. I was very excited and have been there a couple of times since. The funny workout equipment in the parks is quite…uh, funny, and of very limited benefit for me, but it’s nice to see large swaths of grass and sit by the fountain.

I’m getting my medical exam next week so I can get my alien registration card, which will lead to my medical insurance, pension, and bank account. All is well!