09. 04. LUNCH

갈치조림: hairtail stew

Again the word “jorim” strikes us. It’s still not a stew at all, but I’m still going with it. We met in a small group for the last time after the previous day’s seminar, and we climbed a mountain to get to the faculty restaurant where we battled moths and mosquitoes and enjoyed the breeze and fantastic food. I am not that bad at separating the bones from fish, but I am still working on perfection. I got some quality counseling too as an added bonus — it did help, but I think being able to come home made everything better. Wow, I can’t stop talking about that. I swear I’m not usually this mopey about going home, you know, but it’s just that this summer vacation has been great, with all its stupid health problems and yelling and sweaty subway rides and bad movies. And I love home. Whether that word is a building, a room or a country.

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.

09. 02. DINNER

eel and rice on a perilla leaf (깻잎)

Perilla leaves always look so pretty in pictures. Here’s the marinated eel that we have had an oddly few times (does that even make any sense at all) this summer. I maintain that the grilled kind is better, but this was pretty good too after not having had it for a while. I feel just a bit useless — it’s nearly eleven in the morning, I’m leaving tomorrow, and I’m sitting in bed making backlogged entries. I should be packing, or doing the laundry, or a milion other things, but honestly if I start, it’ll just feel like leaving, won’t it. Well. At least I’m coming home for winter break. Four months isn’t torture, and fall semester has lots of little breaks. Four months, it’ll be fine. I should get these entries out of the way.

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. 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. 25. LUNCH

grilled pine mushrooms (송이버섯) and garlic

Awesome, pine mushrooms! I prefer button mushrooms because they require less work beforehand and because they’re more useful for the massive tiny chopping that I do when I do anything with them, which is incredibly rare seeing as how I’m getting lazier and lazier. But I think I’ve been telling myself that because pine mushrooms are simply more expensive. I’m getting mental images of that one chapter in Pyuu to Fuku Jaguar when they get matsutake sent from home and they have no idea what to do with it because it’s so precious and then they end up making this huge block of gum out of it. But this entry is quickly turning maniacal and so I must stop myself. Let’s talk about my brother’s unwillingness to grill things that really need to be grilled before they are ingested, like garlic and onions. He did it again, and again I couldn’t really say anything because, you know, he didn’t have to grill anything at all, and he went through the trouble, but augh the garlic was so raw and nigh inedible.

chicken and stir-fried anchovies (멸치볶음) with rice

All in all it was a bit of a humble meal. It’s a bit odd because what with the free time I have and the fact that I’ll be leaving soon, I should be feeling an overwhelming urge to cook things, but I’m not. At all. I think it’s because I’ve learned more happily than usual that anything I can manage to make, you can buy better. Wait, except for scrambled omelettes. I am still a beast at that.

08. 24. LUNCH

grilled eel

We had to grab a quick lunch (again with all the rushing) before we got on the cable car — incidentally, for hours I was trying to remember how The Fray’s Cable Car went so that I could amuse myself by the mere act of recalling, but I could only think up the tune for How to Save a Life. It wasn’t until ten minutes ago that I realized that what I was remembering was, in fact, Cable Car, and that How to Save a Life merely sounds exactly the same but is — deceptively enough! — a different song. Seriously, Nickelback, look what you have started. Look at this tragedy you have wrought. But those matters aside, I have always wanted to try eel without that special eel sauce that eels always come with, and I didn’t think it would be during this vacation but I managed it. Yay! Gosh it was so good, the sauce looks spicy but it wasn’t, it was sweet-tangy with the slightest kick and eel is so much better when it hasn’t been lying limp and marinated in a refrigerated paper container for half a day. It’s so chewy and fresh and I don’t think I can ever truly go back to the way I have previously enjoyed eels, oh woe, oh sob. There’s just so much more flavor this way, you can never taste the eel itself when it’s marinated with the other kind of sauce.

grilled eel and rice

And then we took the cable car and we went up the mountain and we looked down at the sea and I thought of Zach Braff because The Shins came up on my mp3 player. And I thought, Zach Braff, know that wherever you are, I am thinking of you. And then I thought that maybe he and John Mayer might actually be the same person. That was altogether too much thinking to have done up on a mountain looking down at the sea.

08. 23. LUNCH

막썰어회: butchered sashimi

And here I use the term “sashimi” with all the grains of salt in the world. This “style” of preparing raw fish is mainly for people who are happily consuming alcohol near the sea. I was rather pepped for all the seafood eating that we were going to do, since we were traveling south to where all there is to do is eat seafood and look at the sea, so needless to say, I was a little upset when we decided that we had half an hour until the tour boat departed and that we had to eat whatever we could as quickly as possible. Actually I was pretty damned upset. Despite knowing that this sorry-looking excuse for an establishment would only ever really cater to people who were happily consuming alcohol near the sea, I was convinced that I would rather eat here than at the Chinese restaurant down the block. Actually I would have starved in protest rather than eat at the Chinese restaurant down the block. I do love my Chinese food, but seriously, that’s pointless. It’s so pointless that I don’t even have a decent metaphor for how pointless it is. And there we were, with our father parking the car some ways away, and I tried to be assertive and ask what they had on their menu, and the lady was like, Sea cucumbers. And conches. Which is fine, but not a meal. So I was like, What about fish? And she made this ridiculously vague hand motion towards a full tank, and said, Some stuff like this. And I was like BUT WHAT KIND OF FISH IS IT because it was unrecognizable and she kept saying, Just fish. And I was like AUGH AUGH AUGH. But apparently we were really busy — why, in the first place, was that even necessary? I’d have just bought tickets for the next boat, they have one every ten minutes, Jesus God — so I ended up mumbling that we’d take a fish. Thirty dollars. I was sullen until the food arrived. No, that’s not true, I was sullen all the way through. Besides, it wasn’t even the fish from the tank that we got, it was two much smaller fish from out of the blue and I have no idea what those were either. The only reason that all this wasn’t sketchy was because this was on the waterfront and like hell it would have stayed open long enough for it to get so filthy, if anything funny were going on with its food. Which didn’t stop me from sulking.

boiled mussels

On top of which, the lady had an accent so my brother couldn’t understand her and finally he muttered out loud, I have no freaking clue what you’re saying, so I was rather embarrassed and what she was actually saying was that since we were busy, she would skip the spicy soup part of the meal, and inwardly I was just like OKAY THAT IS FINE JUST GIVE ME MY FOOD SO THAT I CAN EAT IN MY MISERY, and nobody was being the slightest help in the confusion and I was still sulking. I’m no connoisseur, and I don’t take much objection with the fact that the fish was just cut up instead of being sliced according to the natural grain of its flesh, et cetera, et cetera. What I hated was that we were in a hurry when we had no need to be, that the lady wouldn’t tell me the name of the blasted fish I was eating, and that the broth that the mussels were in just tasted like tepid water. All this while the lady was walking back and forth emphasizing that all ingredients were naturally and freshly caught. As I neared the end of the meal, I felt a little sorry for her since she obviously didn’t know what to do with customers as lost as we were, and because the fish was actually good. The mussels were okay, but nothing above average — I could get behind that fish, though. Despite still not knowing what it was. Anyway I was sulking a bit for a good deal of the boat ride as well, up until the man sitting in front of us let us open the window and my brother got seasick. This does not make me a terrible person.

08. 22. DINNER

vegetable tuna and microwavable rice

We have long since established that this blog is anything but a documentary, but when I can record things, I will. This time it was mainly because I was consumed with self-pity. We got to the hotel where we were supposed to be, Geojedo, and the room was huge and had all modern appliances, a TV, a fridge, two beds, functioning lights, the lot, and the bathroom was also really spacious, but the problem was that it was raining like God had decided that the Noahic Covenant was just a bit of a lark he’d had. It was so bad that all the restaurants in the area were closed before eight in the evening, and we had to drive to the convenience store so that we could get some microwavable food there, then microwave it there, then carry it back to the hotel room where we ate in dejected silence. No, the hotel room didn’t have a microwave. Thankfully the TV reception, which had been out during the torrential downpour, returned — and we were able to finish our paltry meal accompanied by the evening’s entertainment. Which was Jackie Chan in “Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow”. Man oh man, that almost made up for the entire lack of actual food present at dinner. Also the bad weather meant that the following two days would be pitch-perfect, the right wind, the right temperature, everything, so I think all in all we were very lucky. Oh hey, optimism. It is nice to meet you.

08. 22. LUNCH

fugu skin and mixed vegetables

I HAD FUGU. I couldn’t resist beginning with excitement, but honestly it isn’t anything to write home about. I was on vacation down south (no, not that far down south) from the 22nd to the 24th, and we stopped by our father’s residential city on our way so that we wouldn’t end up skipping lunch or something equally ridiculous. And there’s a semi-famous (= well-known but only in the near vicinity of the surrounding neighborhood) fugu restaurant there, so I couldn’t say no. But this story is not going to be very thrilling because we didn’t even have fugu sashimi — the lunch sets don’t come with that option, curse the stars — and isn’t a great deal of the fish not even dangerous anyway? Anyway, this lightly boiled fugu skin dish was the best out of the entire meal, I think, the skin is so chewy and fun and we had no idea what those vegetables were but they were also enjoyable.

deep-fried fugu

This is when I started realizing that what people say about how fugu would be a good deal less popular if it weren’t poisonous is all solid truth. Basically it tastes like any other whitefish out there. So it tastes like cod. Surely there is some distinct flavor of its own, but deep-frying isn’t really the most effective way to call forth the subtle nuances of the gustatory sensations, so yeah, it tasted like cod. And I’m not the biggest fan of cod — it’s good when it’s made into pancake form (tee hee) but the fish itself isn’t all that interesting. I’d much rather have whitefish as sashimi than cooked. But the fried fugu was crispy and really hot and by no means was it bad. It was just, you know, it tasted safe.

복어지리: clear fugu soup

It’s boiling! It’s boiling! So in the grand tradition of all fish-related restaurants, we got a huge pot of soup. Except this time we didn’t even order sashimi so — you know, the actual meat on the fish is supposed to be prepared as sashimi, and the leftover bits get tossed into the soup, so in this case — it’s a higher class of soup than customary, I guess, but we were just missing out on fugu sashimi. Which saddens me a little. But the 지리 was pretty good.

복어매운탕: spicy fugu soup

This was better, though. You can probably tell from the picture, but it also comes with dumplings (ten-o’clock) and noodles (three-o’clock). You can also see some of the fugu in the twelve-o’clock direction. I like the bits near the skin the best, since the meat isn’t as packed and dry as it is in other places. I feel like people who like chicken breasts like whitefish, it’s pretty much the same thing, flaky and boring. I mean come on. Seriously. But it was a good meal, especially for the paltry price of eight dollars — I’m not complaining! But one day I will have fugu sashimi and then properly state that I’ve had the blasted fish.