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.

07. 13. DINNER

appetizer with shrimp and clam

Actually it might not be clam. It might be abalone. But it might be clam, and I’m going to say that it’s clam, because this is not really the most important part of the post. So here’s the deal; every time we can, which is probably once or twice a year at most, the old comics club from high school meet up and proceed to squander away our earnings on some ridiculously outrageous item of food we happen to be obsessed with at the time. We did it before with beef, multiple times — this time around, it was crab. To be exact, crab sashimi. This is our version of an eating disorder, we go and we stuff our faces and then we purge our purses. It’s rather edifying, honestly.

steamed eggs with crab and mushroom

By this point, we were already in tears. It was just so warm, and so soft, and why do all words used to describe food always sound so drastically perverted? I especially feel Pedobear lurking around the edges of this one. But enough about Pedobear while talking about a hulking beast of a meal.

appetizer salad with some fantastic dressing

I’m not completely certain where the crab was in this. The meat appears to be pork. Or we thought it was pork. But at any rate, it also had cherry tomatoes and walnuts and pecans and croutons and an amazing sweet-sour dressing. It is going to be increasingly more difficult to add commentary to these pictures, so forgive me if you are spared my nonsensical babble. It is better for all of us.

crab gratin

Also, this is for reference, but the restaurant we went to was called Kora, and its website can be found at koracrab.co.kr. Their site insists that it’s only three hundred meters from the exit of the subway station to the restaurant, but this is a blatant lie. We walked at least twenty minutes just to get to the intersection.

crab soup

We suspect that this misinformation is their way of separating the desirable customers from the less desirable ones. Those who belong to the restaurant most likely will come by car, and thus have no problem reaching it whatsoever. Those, on the other hand, who choose to come by subway, don’t exactly deserve to be eating there. But we made it, through the fire and the flames. Suckers.

crab sashimi

This was our raison d’etre. It was actually a different sort than we’d expected, because we were thinking of a different species of crab, but nonetheless it was really good. I’m rather a fan now. It’s far from chewy, more a gelatinous glob, but it slides off the shell amazingly and the flavor is delightfully. odd. Oh, god, did I just reference what I think I referenced?

grilled crab

My promise of staying silent for this entry has been woefully compromised. Look, here, I’ll make better on it starting now.

steamed crab

crab, sweet potato and squash tempura

crab and noodles and mushrooms oh my

This was the last course, and when we could manage to speak for the joy that clogged our throats, we were very, very, very well satisfied. There was a small plate of fruit afterwards, which was rather disappointing a dessert considering the dimensions of the meal, but we made up for it by getting a dessert of our own that we started craving in the middle of the meal. This seems to be a popular pastime; talking about things you want to eat while eating something really good. Kind of like how I love watching food-related programs during dinner.

녹차빙수: green tea shaved ice with red beans

Ugh, this was so good too. My most recent frame of reference was the piece of crap from Burger King, but independent of that, it was an excellent specimen. The almonds especially, and I liked that they didn’t have fruit, which is only truly necessary when the other ingredients aren’t pulling their weight. Which they totally were. The almonds especially. We were actually going to get drinks from a convenience store and sneak them into a movie or something, but by this time it was magically ten at night and we had to disperse for fear of not being able to take public transportation home. And so we got this out of our system for another long while. The next item of interest is, currently, ostrich meat. If we can find it here out of the zoo.

07. 13. LUNCH

crab pickled in soy sauce (간장게장) and rice

Half a portion of leftovers from yesterday! Yay. So here are two things that need to be invented as soon as possible. One is a search engine for music: the database needs to include every possible genre and songs must constantly be added. What are you supposed to do when you can only hum the song in your mind, or if it’s something classical? The site with the space-bar tapping of the beats can only take you so far, and so this search engine will include a way to search using musical notation — which will play you back the notes you’ve selected so far, so that you know you’re going about it the right way. Key changes will be automatically adjusted for by the system. The second thing is a tool for anyone who is writing anything at any time; it searches for words over a certain length, and then tells you if that word is repeated within a given number of lines. No more worrying about accidentally and awkwardly using the same synonym within the same paragraph! Somebody get me a programmer so I can unload these ideas.

07. 12. LUNCH

메로구이: grilled Chilean sea bass

Coincidentally, we had mero fish again today. It was because we went out for lunch, since my dad’s leaving for Canada in a couple of days — and since the primary item on the menu comes in bountiful servings and is rather determinedly overpriced, we had to order two other main courses to fill out the quota. This way of grilling it makes the fish a lot harder, and the flavor is more from the sauce than the fish itself. It wasn’t bad, but as my brother and I agreed, the kind sold across the street was better.

삼합: fermented skate, pork belly and old kimchi

As soon as I realized that this was on the menu, I knew my mom was going to get it. She is almost irrationally drawn to it, kind of like how I insist on ordering creme brulee everywhere I go. But according to her, an opinion seconded by my father, the kind we had at the restaurant near home was better. I’m no great connoisseur so I can’t say for sure, but there wasn’t anything special about this. Maybe the ammonia was less pronounced than last time, but on the whole it was unremarkable.

간장게장: crab pickled in soy sauce

But this — this was what we were there for. This is what I’m here for, and this is why this blog exists at all — the taste of frivolous nightmares. God. I’m home. Does it make you lonely to hear it? There are no adjectives to describe it, favorable or not, in Korean or any other language. Because really, it’s nothing, and it’s not salty, not sweet, not sour or bitter or spicy, it’s not fishy, it’s not quite anything. But it’s unmistakable. You forget it, and it reminds you, heavy in the back of your throat. At the bottom of things, I think it’s something rather like Seoul. It’s overpriced, it’s not fancy, and it doesn’t even have the good grace or sense to look appealing. It makes absolutely no sense and thinking about what it is for too long will only make your head hurt. But all the same, you’re in love with it. And when you hear it call, it’s not like the beckoning of a siren, nothing like a song in the slightest. It’s uninviting, it’s irresistible, and you can’t rationalize it even to yourself. But all the same, there are people filling the city that feel the same thing you do, and you’re together in this second-rate adoration. It is undeserving of your heart and your heart is not nearly enough to do it justice. It’s an acquired taste; you’re born with it in your blood; you’ll never grow to like it.

게딱지: the shell

Whose fault is it that you eat the cartilage off drumsticks, the innards of lobsters — do you even remember? And eggs. Tiny eggs. Millions and millions, and you with no remorse. This is less a meal and more a ritual, a precise way of dining that has nothing to do with manners, history or culture. It’s just the way things are, you were taught sometime further back than you can recall. Like white tuna and sesame oil, or fresh honeycomb and nori. It’s just the way things are done. And what have you done, you people, for the thousands of years you spent huddled in a peninsula amongst yourselves? How have you had so much time to devote to food, how have you made a religion out of it? And what am I doing, what is this ridiculous blog, there is something in the taste of the crab that floods you with pangs of perspective. What is, even, what is food — why do we take it so personally? How, in a land smaller than Kentucky, have you managed incomprehensible dialects, unnamed dishes, so much squabbling and petty division and this overwhelming bloated sense of self-importance? I have nothing but love for you. And you rend me to pieces. You love me back.