09. 03. DINNER

전어회: hickory shad sashimi

I’ve been using the name “hickory shad” frequently enough that it actually sounds valid now. Here it is, the star of early autumn, mercilessly butchered whole and fantastic all the way through. Seminar weekdays save my soul. We would have gone to the fish market, but we didn’t actually know what we’d be doing or exactly how to get there or how things go down in that land, so we decided to just go to some sashimi restaurant (establishment, rather) where they had hickory shad. Luckily it didn’t take us long to find one, and my life was that much more complete. It’s calcium on a plate, kids. God it’s so good.

광어회: flounder sashimi

And some flounder because everybody loves flounder. I felt responsible for the two plates of hickory shad, though, so I didn’t have much of this. It was pretty good from what I could tell, but is it ever really bad?

매운탕: spicy fish soup

This isn’t usually my favorite part of the meal, since it’s the last thing to be brought out and it’s no longer raw fish. But today it was really good and I learned how to make it taste even better, so my fondness for it has skyrocketed. What you do is you add the bean paste, the garlic, and the leftover perilla leaves while it’s boiling. The bean paste apparently takes care of the fishy sensation, and everything else just tastes good. The more you know!

assorted cakes and ice cream

Yoghurt ice cream with espresso and green tea toppings, tiramisu, sweet potato and cheesecakes. We went down to 예술의 전당 on a whim after the meal, because the scenery there is amazing even when you can’t see it and the place makes you feel like you’re absorbing culture just by standing there. The cafe was called Mozart, how adorable is that. We walked a long while and talked and I’m really going to miss these meetings, but okay, enough of that, I’ll be back for the winter. Three weeks of it. In the meanwhile, I’ll look at pictures and salivate.

08. 15. LUNCH

pork cutlet

Wow, it seems like we have this all the time. And actually we are having it fairly often, this vacation. The drastic deviation is that we are having much less eel and much more pork than usual — I’m not sure why, we still like eel. My brother’s the main culprit behind the pork cutlets, though, it’s easy enough to make and he’s the one stuck at home cooking for himself all the time. If I had my way, you know everyone would always be eating out. JAPANESE STYLE. And then getting really sad when the tempura arrives. An allegory of life at every meal! I amaze myself with my philosophical depth. Once we were watching TV during dinner and they were showing this guy who worked at a rest area cutting pork cutlets, and he was rather impressive. It just strikes me as odd, though, that you would commute to a highway rest area. It defies the definition of the place altogether. It’s like working as a janitor at a garbage dump.

birthday cake

For dessert! You can see the whole cake in the picture for the dinner entry on the 13th. My mother and I agree that for a cake with this much whipped cream, it is surprisingly good. I don’t know if I would like to take it behind the middle school and get it pregnant, but I’m sure my hesitation stems from the many difficulties in the achievement of this wish, not because of any lack of merit on the part of the cake.

08. 14. DINNER

sauteed mussels

This was the actual birthday dinner I had with the family. Thursday evening was a solo recital for the recorder, courtesy of a son of a friend of my mother’s (I prefer longer longwinded interpersonal descriptions) — wait, let me rephrase that. Courtesy of the elder of two sons of a friend of my mother’s who also has her office next to my mother’s in the building in which the School of Nursing professors have their offices. Okay. I guess that’s passable. So I was to have made reservations for four at Mad for Garlic, near where the concert was being held, but I put it off until the day before (even now I don’t think it was an unreasonable thing to do) and all the reservation slots had filled up by the time I called (now that’s unreasonable). Fortunately when we got there at six, the time they advised, there were still seats and we made it in with no trouble. Mad for Garlic is stupidly overpriced and incredibly self-righteous, but that is fine with me because their menu is huge and their food is rather good. We started off with sauteed mussels because my mother, much like me, experiences tunnel vision whenever mussels are mentioned in her vicinity and she must have them no matter what. If she hadn’t, I would have insisted on it, besides. I want you to read this in James Franco’s voice: so good.

garlicholic rice

Man, that is a terrible picture. Excuse the blurry. The restaurant was super dark and the problem with digital cameras is that unless you have a vague idea of what you’re doing, the camera is going to give you a messy piece of crap. Then again before the more analog kind was back in vogue, we had the problem of never quite knowing if we were even managing to take the picture at all, so it’s a fair trade-off. Garlicholic rice is basically just fried rice with some garlic and other stuff thrown it, and James Franco repeats: so good. They obviously had to just to succeed, but they do this thing where you can eat all the garlic in their food, as much as you want, and still you won’t get that breathy aftertaste for hours afterwards. Wow! Magic! I swear I’m not a spokesperson, honest.

vongole mare pasta

Another of my faults: if you give me the choice and if it is possible, I will always go vongole. Even if the tomato-based sauces come topped with mountains of seafood or really good meat or — God help us — bacon, it is physically impossible for me to deny vongole spaghetti. This is kind of like how if you give me the reins, I will choose Japanese food for every single meal. The whole “we had Japanese for lunch so what should we have for dinner” nonsense does not compute. The two meals are independent of each other and both times, the superior choice is clear. Actually it might be a good thing that people don’t allow me to do this, because then I would suffer an existential breakdown from not being able to ever eat pickled crab. Huh.

grilled pizza

That it’s “grilled” says nothing about what’s actually on it, but it was in fact a big part of the reason why we chose it. It’s got mushroom and mozzarella cheese, and we would have gone for the rucola but that came with sweet potatoes and I am not the biggest fan of sweet potatoes on pizza. Later on my mother was lusting after the gorgonzola pizza that the couple at the table over were having, so if we can go before vacation’s over, we’ll be having that. The grilled pizza was pretty good too, but I think Bellamonte does it better, which doesn’t mean a whole lot because Bellamonte’s pizza isn’t world-class or anything. At least they all beat out Di Matteo, which, despite that, is still my favorite.

green tea ice cream

Dessert is rarely if ever my favorite part of the meal, and usually I’m not even particular about having it at all, but dear sweet Lord this has a good shot at overturning that altogether. This deserves three James Francos at once, count them, three: sooo gooooood. The flavor was stronger than is customary, which is a thousand times YES because Jesus God this was so rich and illegally creamy and it tasted more like green tea than diluted milk thank you thank you thank you Mad for Garlic. Fact: the picture kind of makes it look like the ice cream scoops and the tray are making the Joker face. This just renders everything that much better. HA HA HA

tiramisu cake

Isn’t this adorable? The picture is again suffering from a case of the blurs, but look at that little chocolate-powder garlic there, aw. The cake was also really good, I would have been satisfied with just a double serving of the green tea ice cream but even for someone not completely crazy about tiramisu (no, I do like it immensely, but I’ve noticed that fans of tiramisu get a little frightening when the culinary pushing comes to the shoving) it was excellent. Altogether excellent. And just today my brother’s birthday present for me arrived, which is a DVD that they’ve stopped making — honestly, the movie was released in 2005, why would you cease production like that? It’s pretty popular from what I gather — no, now I’m just lying, it’s not all that popular at all. It’s a cult hit, except here “cult” means “people who were teenage girls or close friends of teenage girls in 2005″. So he ordered it secondhand from a DVD rental store that was going out of business, and they shipped it in that rental-store plastic box that requires an authorized machine to get the disc out, oh laugh out loud. We pried it open and it is safe and sound in my hands. All miiiiiine. What are birthdays for, if not unreasonable demands? I have many others lined up for years to come.

08. 13. DINNER

fruit soju, tofu and kimchi, spicy stir-fried chicken (깐풍기), a birthday cake

HOW IS IT THAT EVERY SINGLE TIME I DRINK WE END UP GOING THERE. IS THIS FATE. Though I don’t want to be fighting it, since the only alternatives I could suggest would be tiny dinky cocktail bars where we wouldn’t be able to afford much with the budget from the school, or, you know, beer. And you’re not really often fond of beer. Besides, fruit soju is awesome. So this was my birthday dinner, since I have the translation seminar on Wednesdays — we had the actual meal at Din Tai Fung, my previous visit to which is documented somewhere on this blog, and I would have taken ten gazillion pictures there because we had the deluxe course meal and it was SO. SO FREAKING GOOD. But wouldn’t you know it, I left my camera at home and no one else had one. Luckily someone who did have one joined us, but that was after Din Tai Fung and before the karaoke. Suffice it to say that it was incredible, and so was the karaoke party, and the fruit soju afterwards. I think we had strawberry and mango. Oh, there’s the professor. I am going to miss this class, this city, this land. (But your tendency to withhold movies from me, o Republic of Korea, is not appreciated.)

06. 28. BREAKFAST

카스테라: IS IT CUSTARD OR SPONGE CAKE

Heavenly Father help me in my hour of need. I am confused, I am in so much turmoil; if this food has no relevance to custard whatsoever, and is, in fact, sponge cake, then why is its name half a syllable away from being “custard”? Is it the doing of the Japanese? Must we blame this on them like we blamed “arbeit” and “neurose” on the Germans? Please give me the grace of spirit to forgive them, Lord, for they do not know what they have done. And we are sinners equal in the eyes of the Father, when they also use this word without realizing that what they are ingesting is, in fact, sponge cake. Hear my prayer, Lord, and deliver us from this tragedy of nomenclature. Also it would be nice if I could get up early enough not to have to eat cake for breakfast because it really feels unhealthy thank you. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

06. 13. BREAKFAST

a fried egg and chocolate cake

I can’t believe I had this for breakfast. Granted, it was a very good slice of chocolate cake and a very good fried egg (courtesy of my mother), but honestly it makes no sense. It’s like somebody looked in the fridge and thought, here are some things that need to be et! and then proceeded accordingly. Which is exactly what happened. Hey, I’m not complaining, I think it’s pretty funny and also it was good. Even the kid-friendly chewy vitamin C tablets.