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.

Wow, I’m only four months into my contract, but I start to tear up just thinking about having to say goodbye to my kids, especially the kindergartners.

I’m back in California’s arms for a few weeks, in Los Angeles, and in her arms again, literally. I’ve been in her arms figuratively since we first kissed (on February 18th, 2010 outside the Yosemite Bug cafe), but being physically apart for 9 months has been difficult for both of us.

So I grabbed the opportunity between contracts to see Kamila. Like the song goes, it’s so nice, it’s paradise, to come home, especially when you have someone to come home to.

Late last June, I signed a 1-year contract to teach English at a small private academy (known as a “hagwon”) in Dong-tan, Gyeong-gi province, South Korea. I’ve had a wonderful time teaching and living here since I arrived on June 28th. I’ve always wanted to travel in Asia, and living here has been great, full of interesting and wonderful people, places, things, and not least of all, food. The most pragmatic reason for working here was to make some money and pay off some debts, like my school loan. Considering how badly the US economy is doing, I thought it would be a good idea to go somewhere, even halfway around the world, where jobs were a little, make that a lot, easier to find. I’ve been working here for almost 7 months now, out of a planned 2 years, and everything has been going pretty well.

Enter the monkey wrench. For the past 4 months or so, the woman who owns the hagwon has told my foreign co-teacher and me that the school was having financial difficulties. The number of students hasn’t really increased, which was critical for the school’s continued survival. As I was heading out the door after work on Tuesday the 18th, Kelly, the Korean manager, said she wanted to speak with me. She told me that since the school was having difficulty, they could no longer afford two foreign teachers, and they they decided to let me go.

To say the least, I was in shock. It’s one thing when I was living in the US and got laid off or fired, and it’s another animal all together since I was over 6,000 miles away from the US. Since they prematurely canceled my contract, I lost any chance for the severance pay, which was equal to a month’s pay, and I lost my plane ticket home. Just to get home and lick my wounds, I was going to take quite a licking. Not good.

I headed back to my apartment in Byeong-jeom, dazed, confused, frightened, and starting to get angry about how unfair the situation was. I emailed my recruiter, Issa, a great guy who did a great job getting me here and helping me understand how the process works. While I knew there were a lot of jobs for foreign teachers in Korean, I was deeply unsettled and had a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. Didn’t know if I was even supposed to show up for work the next day. After texting Kelly and finding out I had a month, I felt a little better, but not much. Didn’t sleep much that night.

It’s a complicated situation, but I seem to be moving in the right direction again. And I’m coming home and spending a few weeks with Kamila in Los Angeles before I come back here and do another 1-year contract, this time at a place that appears to be a lot more stable and well funded. It is certainly has a lot more students, always a good sign.

Now I just have to pack and clean up the apartment before February 1st so I can get on a plane as soon as possible, hopefully that day or the next at the latest.

It’s been interesting.

It’s pretty cold here in S. Korea. Fortunately it hasn’t been too windy. I remember a few days in and around Chicago that were not only cold, but windy (No, it’s not called the Windy City because of the weather, but it might as well be the origin of its nickname.), and any exposed skin felt like it was being ripped off. I’m not talking about a little cold and a slight breeze, I’m talking about 5° F (-15° C) and strong gusts, about 30 mph (48 kph). It amazed me that people would choose to settle in a place where you’d experience that every year. And yes, my Canadian friends would laugh at me, they certainly have the right considering what they have to deal with.

And now I’m dealing with Chicago-type cold and wind. Insane. My only advice to someone who’s going out in it is to cover as much skin as possible. And get back inside as quickly as possible.

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!

It goes without saying that some days are better than others. Today was one of those “others”.

I do really love all of the kids some of the time and most of the kids most of the time, but not all of the kids all of the time. I do have 3 or 4 kids that are consistently a challenge, and not just for me, but for the other foreign teacher, Anne, as well, and even the non-foreign English teacher and administrator, Kelly.

I didn’t come to S. Korea with much experience teaching children, and zero classroom management skills. I think Anne and I talked with Kelly and Genie briefly about what we should do if children weren’t behaving (send them out to talk with Kelly or Genie). That was about it. Anne and I both wanted to work harder at managing the classroom than just booting the kids, we needed some way to deal with things, and a way to clearly escalate any discipline we felt we needed to mete out.

It’s difficult to count the first month or so against the kids, or maybe even against us. They’re learning us, we’re learning the curriculum and the kids (and ourselves), and the gears didn’t always mesh smoothly. Anne and I have both been frustrated on numerous occasions with our inability to keep things under control and still feel like we’re doing an effective job teaching something we know well, our native language. We both care about English, we care about the kids, we want them to learn in spite of themselves, the situation they’re in (they spend very long days in school before they come to our hogwon), and in spite of us sometimes. I have to say that Anne and I both care deeply about what we’re doing and are very responsible.

We’ve been here for just over 3 months now and we keep having the same issues with the same kids. I don’t know about Anne, but I’m dealing with the challenges differently than I did the first couple months. I think the kids want to test your boundaries, see how you’re react to them when they ignore you, won’t follow directions, or generally misbehave. I’ve changed how I deal with their unhelpful behavior when I’ve found that my reaction to them is unhelpful or damages my relationship with them. At first, I tried to talk over them, then I’d slap the desk or the white board to get their attention. I’m ashamed to say I used to yell. I’m sorry.

I also would fall silent, and then wait until they noticed that I was silent, and then they would quiet down, so it did work, but not for long. I’m not sure that an orthodox pacifist could manage a hogwon classroom. I don’t yell anymore, or bang on the desk or white board. I will talk over some of the minor chattering. The method that seems to work the best for Anne and me is to give them a warning or two, depending on how disruptive we think they’re being, and then write their name on the board with 1 “X” by it. Most of them know the system by now, but I explain it to them anyway. The first X is an official warning. If I give them a second X, I put a chair at the front of the room where I stand and they have to sit in it until I let them go back to their seat. If they’re still misbehaving and being disruptive at the front of the class, then I send them out to talk with Kelly or Genie. They’d much rather that I put them on the rack than have to have Genie and Kelly yell at them. As a foreign teacher, I can yell at them in English, and I’m certainly not allowed to touch them to discipline them. The same rules don’t apply the Genie and Kelly. Whew, I’ve heard them tear into kids a few times, and I’d hate to be on the receiving end of it, even if I couldn’t understand a word of it. Kelly practically dragged a kid out of my class just today. Of course G&K can also call their parents and let them know they were being a pain. That’s probably the killer.

The public school English teachers I know teach junior high and high school students, who are generally better behaved. Hogwons teach a much greater range of kids. I have kindergarten up to high school, and I’ve taught a few adults as well, all at the same school. When the ages (and behaviors) of every class is different, 6 classes a day, it can be interesting, especially when you have a magical set of classes (we alternate the classes we teach) that  has some of the most unruly kids.

And it was indeed a magical day for me!

Hey, if the job were easy, it wouldn’t pay much and you wouldn’t learn about yourself. I’m learning, and I’m growing, it’s all good.

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.