09. 02. BREAKFAST

tofu with soy sauce

Not the same kind of tofu that I usually get, this is harder and has a different purpose, but the portion is much smaller so it’s better to have for breakfast when you decide that the bread isn’t quite good enough to have two days in a row without inciting some sort of negativity from you. Completly unrelated to this (I hope), we’ve been reading 20th Century Boys to prepare for the upcoming film. So far we’ve been ashamed for knowing not much more about it than the word FRIEND and THE END OF THE WORLD. But Jesus God it is so epic. It’s got some flaws, or at least some elements that make me react in something less than awe, but the scale of the story is mindblowing and it’s genuinely emotional sometimes, and also it’s just ridiculously cool. It almost nearly makes me want to read Monster. TOMODACHI TOMODACHI, suckers.

09. 01. BREAKFAST

garlic bread with cream cheese

If the bread’s got garlic in it, that makes it garlic bread, right? We accidentally bought a thing of cream cheese that didn’t come in a sealable container, but was packaged like butter. So we felt that the cream cheese was in dire need of being eaten. Needless to say, this urgency wore off in a day or two and currently the rest of the cream cheese is sitting in a separate sealable container in the fridge. It’s okay bread, though, even if it doesn’t actually taste anything like garlic.

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. 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. 24. BREAKFAST

육개장: yukgaejang

That is much too sensible a caption for my tastes, but I am a bit worn out from the ranting in the previous post and you can always Wiki the word if you’re really curious. I see no reason why you should be, or would be — pretty standard fare. The only two things on the breakfast menu for the hotel were this and the beef rib soup from the day before. I think they’re being considerate to those with hangovers, but it’s ostensibly a family hotel and there were only two other groups we encountered that were lodging there, both families with tiny children. Anyway, again the soup was boiling hot and I wept to have to wait. But it was good. Honestly, I am all typed out for today but I still have a couple more posts lined up so bear with me if I don’t gush about everything I ever ate, even if it was very, very tasty, thank you Geoje Family Hotel.

08. 23. BREAKFAST

갈비탕: clear beef rib soup

Clear beef rib soup. It is ridiculous. I love it. The hotel we stayed at had two options, either you could reserve a room with a kitchen unit, or you could get a room without one but with breakfast service for free. Since obviously we weren’t going to be cooking anything anytime, we went for the latter. The hotel is situated amazingly, ours wasn’t the super magnificent best suite in the building exclusive partytime room or anything but we had this utterly gorgeous view, and those pictures aren’t going to be on this blog but seriously, this was such a great vacation. They served breakfast in the little cafe attached to the hotel, charming cushions, flowered wallpaper and everything. For all that the breakfast menu was stubbornly Korean, but I liked it. You need something hearty for a day’s worth of sightseeing. The catch was that they brought the food out to the table while it was still boiling fiercely, and since I am not so good with hot foods I had to let it sit for a long excruciating while until it was edible, and even then it was incredibly hot, but ugh so good. James Franco, where are you when I need you?

08. 16. BREAKFAST

peaches

It might be a statement as to what I’ve been doing with my life that I feel the uncontrollable urge to add “Geldof” to the end of that caption. She’s two years younger than I am, isn’t that unbelievable? But enough about the lass and back to the fruit. I do like peaches, but they’re a bit pricey so it seems like I have them something like once a year at most. Actually every kind of fruit is a bit pricey to begin with, cherries, grapes, mangoes, Asian pears, you name it. Sometimes watermelons are cheaper than most, and in the winter tangerines are pretty affordable. Wow, I make our family sound pretty destitute. But it’s true, most of the fruit is imported and domestic stuff has always been even more expensive than that. The last clear memory I have of eating a peach is in middle school, when I received a reply from a teacher to whom I was forced to write a postcard during summer vacation. Good times.

08. 14. BREAKFAST

omelette

And my brother tries his hand at making an omelette. Since my dad won’t ever do it, all there remains is for me to do my part — unfortunately I refuse to, unless there are mushrooms and paprikas in the fridge. Meat is optional and so are onions, but without mushrooms and paprikas I will not stir. Of course the only person that would be benefiting from my stirring would be me, I have better things to do in the morning than be charitable. At any rate, my brother’s omelette was ambiguous. I felt uncertain whether to thank him or, you know, not. I did thank him, because I got a breakfast out of it just by sitting on the couch and staring at the TV for a quarter hour, but my oscillation stemmed from the fact that nothing in the omelette was actually cooked. I asked him, Did you stir-fry the onions and the potatoes before you put them into the egg? And he confidently replied that he hadn’t. I don’t know what to do with such honesty. I did advise him to do so, the next time he planned to make an omelette. For some reason the family harbors this opinion that his cooking skills are better than mine — probably because I don’t actually do any cooking unless I really really have to — but honestly, sometimes they should think to doubt.

08. 09. BREAKFAST

un sandwich

This is from the same place that I previously had the pretty amazing sandwich from, but unfortunately it is not the same pretty amazing type of sandwich. According to my brother, who went on an errand to the bakery because he was craving a pretty amazing sandwich, the pretty amazing sandwich did not exist in that place at that time. We were heartbroken. This sandwich wasn’t bad by any means, but true to form, it was not as amazing as it could have been. Also my brother thought that the offer to have the sandwich cut meant that it would be cut in the middle, down the half, in two, but alas, he was wrong. He seems to do that a lot, miscommunicate with people who are trying to sell him things.

07. 21. BREAKFAST

crackers with tuna salad

I am having this. Which means that we went to E-Mart. Huzzah for food! I keep forgetting that I should stock up, I might as well, so I always end up getting three cans and polishing it off in a week and then being very sad about the whole ordeal. Anyway Monday starts off smoothly. Also right now I am still listening to this radio show and it is all kinds of ridiculous. Of course half the jokes fall flat, but the other half don’t where they should, so it’s just even more ridiculous. For example currently Zhuge Liang and his brother have been making fools of themselves for five whole minutes out of a twenty-minute episode. Actually let me revise something back there — half the jokes that fall flat are only half failures, because at least you can tell what they’re referencing with the gag, which is marginally better than some avant-garde invention of humor that involves creative ways of inducing awkward silences. I am so sick of awkward silences in comedy shows. Let me just make that clear, out of the blue.