08. 31. DINNER

conveyor belt sushi

Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, et cetera. I would have thrown a fit if we left without having gone here at least once, so I dragged my brother out randomly for dinner just so that I could satisfy my raging gluttony. It’s about ten minutes from our house, Sushihiroba, and god I love it to pieces. Everything’s always so bright and fresh and they’re really nice there and usually there’s room and it’s just so great. We didn’t get the best seat for this meal, it was at the bar the furthest from the door, but then again we couldn’t have been sitting at a table and it wasn’t like we were getting less of anything. I would have taken pictures of every single dish but that would have impeded my eating greatly and also looked pretty abysmally silly. But we had a bunch of awesome things, snapper (again, bream?), some semi-awesome part of red tuna, mackerel, a lot of other stuff that looked and tasted amazing but the names of which were unknown to us. We racked up quite a bill.

전어초밥: hickory shad sushi

And lo and behold, for here is the hickory shad, reigning champion of my recent dreams. When I was raving about them I had in mind the sashimi, complete with crunchy bone, but actually this way might be superior. For one thing there’s a lot more of the fish you’re eating in one bite, since the sashimi has to be sliced thin enough for the bones to be edible, and also that’s more of the skin, which is terrifyingly good. This was fantastic. I saw on the menu that they had the hickory shads in special since they were in season, so I decided to order a plate. We had one each, and even my brother agreed that we should go against custom and order another two. I’ve never had fish quite this fresh, it was definitely different from — and much better than — well, pretty much everything else out there. I can’t really say much about it except that you’ll know instinctively what I mean by fresh. Just the right amount of chewy, the still-wet feeling of that skin, and seriously the flavor is insane. You can get, what, five kinds of fish in the Princeton area? Tuna, salmon, yellowtail, mackerel and flounder? Psh. This is where it’s at. Seasonal fish. Sure, flounder, rockfish, steady-sellers, but you get so bored of them. Mmm. Fresh seasonal fish. I’m marrying into a seaside village.

08. 31. BREAKFAST

plain yoghurt and scrambled eggs with sausage

This time we did have milk in the house so I was able to make scrambled eggs. The sausages were not being et so I decided to take care of them — wait, deja vu, have I mentioned that before? So I am still the maker of best eggs that I know. Granted the scrambled eggs are a little different every time I try them because I don’t exactly know when to stop, but still they are excellent. I just undermined myself. Anyway here is a crapload of pepper and some parsley that’s been expired for over two years now but is fine because it’s just some dried flakes of grass, nothing bad will happen to it that you won’t notice. It’s okay! You’re safe! WAR IS OVER

08. 30. DINNER

grilled clams

As usual, seminar weekdays consist of a bit of agonized venting over the untranslatability of particularly sexy phrases and a whole lot of musing over what we will eat after the agony is over. Today we were scheduled to go to a traditional fish market because them hickory shads is in season and I’ve been going on about them for ages. Unfortunately we spent a little too much time agonizing and by the time we decided it was enough, we were too tired and hungry to put in the effort to pick out fish at a market. So we put that off for another day — which we didn’t actually end up doing, but that was fine the way it was, as shall be seen in a later post. Anyway, instead we suggested grilled clams, which you usually have near the sea, of course, but the other girls in the seminar are angels and since they know the neighborhood, they mentioned a place very close by called “Auntie’s Clams” or somesuch. Snicker, snicker, yes, but honestly, it was so great. Maybe “clams” isn’t right because you also get a couple mussels and conches along the line, but hey, bivalves or not, it was all equal in excellence.

바지락칼국수: handmade noodles with clams

Jesus God this was legendary. The general consensus was that this was even better than the grilled clams. I won’t go that far because I am passionately in love with grilled clams, but whereas those are usually excellent, this is definitely the best 바지락칼국수 I have ever had. The restaurant our family used to love a couple years back that closed down while we were abroad, that was good, but this was unbelievable. It’s got so many clams in it, and the broth is phenomenal, so rich and inexplicably complicated and just perfect. Also it comes in a ridiculously huge bowl as evidenced by its contrast in size with the top of a bottle of soju. Ugh seriously, Auntie. You go girl.

assorted fruits

The fruits are self-evident so I won’t caption them. This is a bit of a famous place in this college area, apparently, it’s a tiny fruit store that lets you order as little of the fruit as you like, then they cut it up for you and you can take it home if you like. What a stupidly good idea for a college town. Also the fruit was amazing, you wouldn’t think it would be anything so special but everything was so sweet and we were all so full from the clams but we couldn’t resist polishing off half of what is pictured above. Still we felt a little ashamed about not being able to demolish the entire load. I love this seminar.

08. 30. LUNCH

a super supreme pizza from god knows where

Or I’d have known if I’d paid any attention at all, but I was in my room doing something while my brother ordered the pizza. I’m not trying to be vague, but honestly I’m sure I was doing something besides staring out the window or spinning in my spinny chair. I just can’t remember. Eh, it was probably ONTD or rewatching early episodes of Flying Circus. Anyway we like getting the super supreme pizza because most pizza places have something of that name and it usually tastes the same. I’m at least sometimes willing to look up the menu online to see if there is something more appetizing, but my father and my brother are all about either delegating the duty of talking to a salesperson or just getting whatever the super supreme might be. I also hate talking to salespeople, I’ll have you know. I just figure that they won’t even remember me no matter how big a fool I accidentally make of myself, and even if they do, I won’t see them again, and even if they do, what are they going to do about it, huh? Yeah. Anyway I remember that I had to leave for the translation seminar, so I stuffed a couple slices in, inhaled, brushed my teeth, then sped out the door. Still I was half an hour late, but aren’t I always.

08. 30. BREAKFAST

tuna salad and walnut cookies (호도과자)

Well, this is sudden. So the tuna salad you’ve seen often, but it always looks so pretty in pictures so I couldn’t exclude it. As for the — well, the walnut cookies — haha, the word “cookies” is so inappropriate here that I don’t even want to try to think of another word. Well, as for them, usually you have them in a white paper bag on a winter day or at a highway rest area or something, so I have no idea why my mother brought a bag home or why I was having them for breakfast. But they were really good though perhaps not quite as good as they are when they’re still warm, and they had bits of real walnut inside them and walnuts are pretty amazing.

08. 29. DINNER

shrimp pesto pizza

The same Pizza Hut as last time with the garlic gorgonzola pizza, with the same company. It’s just that the Pizza Hut is very near the entrance to the mall and at least you know you’re not taking any wild chances with the quality of your food. Which is very important because otherwise you end up at a buckwheat noodle place where they serve the worst excuse for sushi you have ever seen. At any rate, I am in a much better mood right now because I CAN COME HOME FOR WINTER BREAK. This is amazing. Instead of nine months, all I have to spend away is around four at the most. And I’ll be home for Christmas, and for the New Year, and I can shop for winter clothes, and see it snow, and have winter foods, and I was this close to crying myself to sleep tonight but I’m ecstatic now. Six to seven more years until I’m out of school, but if I can come back like this I think I can do it. It’s a lot more lax in grad school, so maybe then I can be home for Thanksgiving too, and get stuck in traffic again and buy Asian pears and dried persimmons, and maybe I can be back for the Lunar New Year, more getting stuck in traffic and New Year foods and I can pay my little nieces and nephews for bowing — am I too old to get money for that now? — and I guess it can only get better. I hope so.

a green tea latte from Caffe Pascucci

And then we didn’t want to go home so we sat at one of the three Caffe Pascuccis at the mall (who knows why they have three, but then again you know how it is with a ridiculous number of Starbucks establishments everywhere you go, so it’s like that only better because Caffe Pascucci is dearer to my heart) and we drank. I’ve never actually had coffee there (I’ve discovered that coffee is one of the few things that have a very high probability of getting my stomach upset) (actually I don’t know what the other things are, in that case) so I’m not too sure about the authenticity of the coffee that they brew, but the green tea stuff they make is pretty good, so. Then again green tea makes the world a better place always.

08. 28. DINNER

grilled salmon and sticks of cucumber

And the longer it takes for me to work up my nerve. I leave the day after tomorrow and I am writing this backlog with more depression than thoughts of food in my heart. We know this is unusual. I mean, I’m going to try to keep it marginally entertaining just so that I have something to read when I browse this blog later on in the year, but really if I wanted to look at pictures of grilled salmon I could find better examples than this. So in all honesty I could just skip the commentary altogether for posts like these, except then the entries would be oddly irregular and I need to fill up this ridiculous emptiness somehow. Lorem ipsum? Would that be cheating? Actually I think this is long enough, so I’m going to stop here. This is like one of those short stories about writing a short story. Annoyingly meta and no good for anyone at all.

08. 27. DINNER

boiled pork and rice with a stick of cucumber

Look! The cucumber is growing out of the rice! It’s nothing but honest magic. I guess it’s a pretty average meal and I was enjoying the cucumber sticks because cucumber sticks are awesome if they’re accompanied with the bean paste of choice wait actually they are still awesome without the aid of any condiment but seriously it goes from side dish to mere vegetable without the bean paste and I’ve started rambling about things again but wait, this isn’t what I was set to ramble about. We were watching TV and we had the right time slot to catch all the food-related shows, and they had this special on this one fish I have no idea what the English name is, Wiki says “hickory shad” but have you ever heard that name before? Because if it’s as common as it should be, non-fishermen should be well-acquainted with the name too, but at any rate, it’s that fish, and it’s just coming into season now that fall is coming, and the fish are fattening up and they’re being caught by boatfuls and oh god when you watch them flop it’s like you can taste them in your mouth. The sashimi looked phenomenal, I love the kind where they slice up the little bones along with the skin and Jesus God just talking about it is driving me insane. Gluttony has its own circle of Hell. I would post a picture but I’m kind of desperately hoping that I can have it somewhere before I leave and also talking about it has made me too depressed to work up the energy to resize the picture. Farewell, cruel blog.

08. 26. DINNER

steamed king crab

Happy birthday to my brother. For several days he couldn’t make up his mind as to what he wanted to eat for his birthday dinner. This indecision is a concept strange to me, and I tried to force him to decide by asking him every two minutes. He grew tired of that really quickly. Then I started suggesting options, all of which ended up being seafood, and he looked at me levelly and was like, We just came back from a crapload of seafood. And I was like YEAH BUT YOU DON’T GO NAKED JUST BECAUSE YOU WERE CLOTHED YESTERDAY and that made so much sense. We haven’t had king crab since the last time we brought two steamed to our grandmother’s (maternal) place, and that must have been at least the year before last because I wasn’t home for Thanksgiving last year. These are really convenient because they steam them for you at E-Mart when you pick them out, and they’re really economical considering that two are more than enough for the entire family to stuff its face like war refugees. Unfortunately our father wasn’t home, but we partied anyway. HA.

crab innards and rice

This is so the best part of the entire crab. It’s in the body, close to the head part of the shell (is that even the head for crabs? It’s like I never took bio) where the eggs are — that’s the, you know, the stuff that looks like eggs in the above picture — and the super flavorful flesh. I will term this the “breast-to-rest conundrum”: which to choose, chicken breast or the other parts of the blasted bird? In this case, though, the legs of the crab would be analogous to the chicken breast. They’re meatier, but the flesh is slightly drier, (though of course it’s not really dry at all, if it’s good steamed crab, you don’t even need to scrape the meat off the shell) and it’s considered the more conventional part to eat. But I’d probably trade in all the legs for the body — it’s great, there’s just so much more taste to it, and I adore that slightly bitter edge. It’s just like pickled crab, really, the body also goes a lot better with rice. Mmmmmmmm, birthdays. I’m eating a lot of crab this vacation, and that reminds me of when I was going to take the Spanish proficiency exam and all we could think to suggest as examples when we were preparing was CANGREJO CANGREJO CANGREJO and it became a running joke and we were going to get some after the exam, but — aw, what a sad ending.

08. 25. DINNER

marinated pork rib and rice

No way, I haven’t had this so far this vacation? I find that hard to believe. Maybe I forgot to take the picture. But anyway we were trying to think of what to have for dinner and I thought maybe pork ribs would be nice, because we hadn’t had it in a while, definitely. So I bought some and we asked the Deaconess — wait, wait, wait, that sounds really, really confusing. Back up there. So. We’ve had hired help around the house since we were little, because we couldn’t be expected to cook and clean for ourselves at the tender ages of whatever it is that you consider a tender age. Back then we were living next to our grandmother’s place and we were all attending the same church, so the lady that helped was a friend of our grandmother’s from church. We weren’t taught to call her “grandmother” despite the term not being exclusive to relatives, I don’t know why, and we always called her “Deaconess” — wow, that sounds so incredibly odd in English. Like it’s a class of the nobility or something. Anyway, we’ve had two or three different ladies since then, not all of them acquaintances from church, and I guess maybe it was just a form of respect to call her “Deaconess” because I think we called the second one “grandmother” for sure. The lady who helps us now (since although we can grill things and cook rice and get the basics out of the way, we’re not skilled enough to make side dishes or kimchi or the like) is another Deaconess acquaintance from church, though, so we call her — okay enough about this. What was I talking about — yes, the pork ribs. So what we wanted was pork ribs marinated and boiled in bean paste, but while I was being exhausted from the walk in hot weather, my brother took the ribs to the Deaconess and promptly forgot to say anything about bean paste. Soooo we ended up with the spicy version, which we’re also fond of, but it gets on your hands so much — I have no idea why this entry is so long. I’m going on and on about deaconesses, what.

명란젓: salted pollack roe

Speaking of deaconesses, though, I think this is the food I most strongly associate with my early childhood. I have no idea why we had so much of it, or even if we actually did, but I have a feeling it was present at the majority of meals. And when I recall that we used to bounce around like rubber on the couch and try to sing along to the theme song of the cartoon on TV and generally refuse to eat dinner, the spoon masquerading as a train usually had rice and salted pollack roe on it. Now that I think about it, what an odd thing to try to feed little children. But we never had much of a sweet tooth.