Feeding My Passion

Picked over

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.

I think we did finish all of that hard cider. At least that’s what the police report said. I kid.

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.)

Hamming, uh, turkey-ing it up. That dude had my knife between his teeth. Don’t show this to his dentist.

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 a few years.

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!

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!

One of my favorite things to make from my favorite cuisine in the world, Vietnamese goi cuon. The filling ingredients are pretty flexible, though I’m partial to these: red leaf lettuce, hothouse cucumbers, green onions, rice vermicelli, cilantro, bean sprouts, poached shrimp (cut in half and place in the wrapper skin-side out so the pink shows through like it does here), and mint. We added carrots for a little color, and you can put in other herbs as well, red parilla, thai basil, rau ram, watercress, poached pork, vietnamese chicken or pork sausage (a delicious and subtle forcemeat).

They’re so easy and inexpensive to make, that you can play around with them, people can make their own (I’ve taught classes and friends how to make them several times now.).

We served them with hoisin peanut dipping sauce and Thai tom kha gai (chicken coconut milk soup). Actually, “tom” means boiled, “kha” is galangal, and “gai” is chicken. Since the important thing is the galangal, you can actually vary the protein. The recipe I’m using now is from the inestimable David Thompson’s Thai Food, and he gives a couple two major variations of “dtom khaa” (his Anglicisation), the other with trout which I’d like to try sometime. Here are his head notes for the dtom khaa gai we made:

Although this soup’s name means ‘boiled glalngal’, it has become associated in most people’s minds with chicken. However, many othe ringredients can be used in a dtom kha: fish, shellfish, mushrooms of all kinds, quail and pork are some possibilities.

He also has five variations of tom yum (dtom yam in Thompson, hot and sour soup, made most often with shrimp in the US).

Day 2 on Shumei’s Santa Cruz Farm, where they use natural methods to grow produce that is beyond organic, at least organic as it is known and certified now. The friend I visited Santa Cruz with, Kamila, is a part of the Shumei organization, and I was fortunate enough to gain access and make pictures there for one of the four sections of my photo essay that is a kind of visual companion to The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

In reverse chronological order, so up first, the radish (kkakdugi) kimchi.

Radish kimchi is much easier and faster than the white cabbage (baek) kimchi I made a few weeks ago and have already consumed (yum!). There’s very little salting, no rinsing, no stuffing (except the jars at the end), and it doesn’t take as long to ferment.

The name, kkakdug, is onomatopoeic as it’s the sound of chopping the radishes into cubes to make this dish. I got the recipe (and the trivia) from Growing up in a Korean Kitchen by Hisoo Shin Hepinstall.

Portrait of kimchi as a young pickle – I’ve already covered the one on top with napa cabbage leaves.

This is before I’ve topped it with water. There’s chopped napa cabbage in there, along with watercress, mustard greens, green onions, grated ginger, lots of garlic (of course!), chopped walnuts, sugar, lemon juice, Korean dried chili flakes (duh!), sweet rice flour, fish sauce, and salt. Yum.

I’ve topped these off with water and they’re ready to start fermenting. The kimchi will sit out on the counter, with the lid on, for 2-3 days before I stop the fermentation by refrigerating it. Between now and Monday, I’ll be tasting, oh yes, I will be tasting.

Chocolate-Almond Buttercrunch Toffee – Kitchen alchemy at its very finest: Turning butter, sugar, salt, vanilla, baking soda, chocolate, and almonds into this glorious pile of delicious joy. David Lebovitz, who worked at Chez Panisse, is the awesome pastry chef who came up with this recipe. He has some amazing looking cookbooks as well, and I hope to be buying one sometime soon.

While the expense of making this recipe is considerable (2 1/4 pounds of candy calls for 1 pound of almonds, 10 ounces of chocolate (I prefer Ghiradelli 60% cacao because it’s assertive, and it needs to be), plus 2 sticks of butter – the cost of everything else is negligible), the technique is simple, and the results are stunning. I’ve made it probably a dozen and a half times now, and it is still remarkable to me.

I also still find it completely irresistible. I give the stuff away as quickly as possible since I can (and have) devoured the better part of a 2 pound batch in less than 3 days. Luckily I have selfless friends and photojournalism classmates who have volunteered to save me from this batch. Thank you thank you!!

This is about as fussy as I get when I cook or bake.

Before baking

After baking, but before devouring.

And where, do you ask, are the walnuts? There is a layer of finely chopped walnuts between the apples and the crust.

Delicious.

I’m happier with the second set of loaves from my first batch of brioche dough. I used smaller pans, so although the weight of the dough was the same as the first 2 loaves, the volume was better. I also let them bake longer (50 minutes as opposed to 30-40), which made them drier of course. But there’s so much fat in this dough (butter and eggs folks, and a lot of it), that it would take longer to ruin it than with other breads that don’t have the fat. In this case, a little drier is better.

I baked my first brioche today.

Care for a schmear of butter with your loaf of eggs and butter? Why yes I do!

This is a very good recipe from Artisan Breads in 5 Minutes a Day. One batch makes 4 loaves! It’s very easy and quite incredible, especially since the flavor of whatever honey you use will dominate. I used what I had on hand, which was clover, but I’ll probably use a milder variety next time.

* I can’t take credit for the clever multi-lingual pun, it belongs to a friend who is fluent en Français, Madeline Moss. At least I have funny friends!

I’m learning some Korean in advance of going there to teach English, which will hopefully happen by the middle of the summer. I’m also going to start making some Korean dishes, starting with their all-time most important one, kimchi.

Like lasagna, there are many varieties of kimchi and ways of making it. I’m starting with a pretty mild version before I try tong paechu kimchi, which is the stereotypical kind: Cabbage, whole-head, and fiery-red. (Yes, I know AP style is to leave off the last comma in a series before the conjunction, but I found leaving it off confusing in some cases and told my J105 instructor just that. My writing is already confusing enough, thank you!) I don’t think anyone in the house except me will eat anything but the white cabbage variety anyway, especially if I don’t ease them into it with this type. There are 3 other varieties besides baek kimchi I want to make before I leave: Whole head (tong paechu), cucumber (oi kimchi), and cubed radish (kkakdugi).

Take a look at my first batch of kimchi!

Looking very delicious in their sterilized jars, at the beginning of their 3-4 day fermentation.

Besides the cabbage, there’s ginger, garlic, dried chili threads, Korean radish, Asian pear, scallions, Fresno chilies, pine nuts, red dates (aka jujubes), sugar, and lemon juice.