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. 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.

07. 01. DINNER

동그랑땡: it is way too complicated so let me tell you about it below

First things first. These are made of ground beef, tofu, apparently scallions, some sort of floury substance that I don’t know about, and presumably they are coated in egg (yolk only? I’m not certain) and then fried. The odd part is that we didn’t have ground beef, because for some reason my mother, my father, and I all had a braindead moment while shopping and bought ground pork instead. So I suspect that these are actually made with ground pork. Which, I guess, is okay, because they taste the same. I love them so. When I was super little and attending swimming lessons, they used to make us kick lying down on the edge of the pool until I thought I was seriously going to expire then and there. And I used to console myself with the thought of maybe having these for dinner. I may or may not have done the exact same thing during piano lessons, but in general piano lessons are a big blemish in the happy years of my youth. There was a lot of animosity.

a tangerine

Or is it a mandarin orange? A mikan? A clementine? I couldn’t tell you. The mother and daughter who withdrew a crapload of money and then disappeared were found dead today. I didn’t think they would be. I thought they’d taken the money and went somewhere happy, found Xanadu, you know, were bathing off the coast of some Caribbean island. You know. Taken the money and escaped. But I guess it was never that happy.

06. 15. DINNER

boiled dumplings (물만두), cucumber kimchi (오이김치) and watermelon

I have missed these boiled dumplings like no other. I realize this entire blog is centered around being incorrectly elitist toward food, even when I’m eating garbage like chocolate cake and fried egg for breakfast, but I need to get this point across; most dumpling skins are wrong overseas. There only needs to be a barely-present, translucent film around the filling, you’re not burying the stuffing, you’re just trying to wrap it as lightly as possible. You’re hardly supposed to taste the skin at all. The only type of dumpling I have found overseas that matches this criterion was vegetarian, and that of course bummed me to no end. But hey. Now it’s okay. Also the watermelon (picked so painstakingly by my father knocking on half a dozen specimens and trying to determine which resulted in the highest note) was incredible.