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. 21. LUNCH

묵: awesome possum jelly

Seminar weekdays are super great. Today we went to get duck, and before it descended upon our tables we had the usual assortment of side dishes. This looked so good that I had to take a picture even though I think I didn’t actually have any of it since it was on the other side of the table. Wiki lists the name of the food as “muk” but that just reminds me of Pokemon and it looks like it should be pronounced wrongly. So I am going to call it awesome possum jelly. Besides, we couldn’t quite figure out what it was made of, it definitely wasn’t acorn and didn’t seem to be green soy either. Speaking of green soy, I am this close to going off on a tangent about green soy sprouts and the name of the food derived from them and the scholar-politician who gave his name to the food and the era of criminally romantic turmoil that he lived in, but I will restrain myself.

steamed and stuffed duck

This is before it was carved to bits, but inside the duck there’s a huge mound of sticky rice and chestnuts and pumpkin seeds and pine nuts and dates and other good things. But really I’ve never been a fan of making rice sweet with things like chestnuts and dates, and I was in it for the meat, so I went mostly for the duck. It was really good, but the reason I love duck is because it’s so dark and greasy and rich — this way of cooking it made it taste much closer to chicken than anything I was used to. It was good, but I did enjoy the next item on the list more.

barbecue duck

Oh, yay. This was more like it. We’d actually thought that the steamed duck would be enough for the five of us, but thankfully we were wrong and we had to order half a barbecue duck in addition. Truth be told, I think I might have been a little sad without it. Of course after the eating was done, I was disgustingly full — miraculously enough, I actually gained a significant amount of weight from that one meal, no lie. I’m still burning it off, maybe another day or two and I’ll be back to the pre-duck equilibrium, but what the hell, duck. What the hell. (The great thing about ducks is that no matter what you say to them, they will quack back at you. It is so cute.)

08. 15. DINNER

해물파전: seafood pancake

Despite her assertions that she can and will make everything that is asked of her, my mother clearly has her specialties. This is one of them. The others being steamed egg custard, the soy sauce-based fried chicken, and some obvious others that I am forgetting because I haven’t had them in a while. If I was threatened with murder unless I picked out a shortcoming of this 파전, I would say that maybe the scallions need to be chopped up into two or three parts, since they are rather long as they are and it’s hard to separate them into bite-sized pieces. But that’s not really a shortcoming, that’s a preference, and we know our mother likes her vegetables as whole as possible. Do scallions count as vegetables? This is a useless question.

boiled squid

This is only partially relevant, since this is boiled squid, but — I find odd the idea of finding the eating of live octopus squeamish to behold. Does that sentence make any sense at all? My opinion is that there are things that can be eaten, and things that cannot be eaten, and octopus definitely belongs in the former category so it doesn’t really matter whether it’s dead or alive, cooked or raw. The only kind of live octopus I’ve had was at one of the many tiny, not-so-fancy Japanese restaurants near my high school, so the bits were really small and you couldn’t even feel them move once you had them in your mouth. So maybe I’m not the best judge of whether it’s gross or not. But the idea of it definitely doesn’t strike me as particularly unusual. Then again to the “cannot be eaten” category I would put every kind of bug out there (I would say “almost”, but I can’t think of an exception) and maybe modern furniture, so I am not all that encompassing. I have my limits.

08. 08. DINNER

tofu and kimchi with fruit soju

Passetyme with gude companye. Olympics, what olympics? We were drinking by then. Actually I did catch the beginning of the opening ceremonies on the TV mounted up on the ceiling, but it wasn’t really a priority. It’s difficult to really enjoy drinking on a gustatory level once you’ve had fruit soju, I maintain. Unless you’re getting cocktails. Which… doesn’t really count, because the whole point is that fruit soju tastes less like alcohol and more like heaven, which is the same deal for cocktails so there’s no point in arguing between the two. Am I making any sense at all? I think it’s bedtime. Anyway, pictured above are the kiwi and mango flavors. As well as a plate of tofu and kimchi that we ripped through.

해물전: seafood pancake

And there is that word again, “pancake”. But by now I really couldn’t care less. There is such a drastic difference in the amount of time the alcohol takes to get to you, depending on whether you’re drinking on an empty stomach or not — I mean, sure there is a difference, that’s obvious, but I wouldn’t have thought there would be such a gap. This 해물전 was sorely lacking clams. It’s rainy-weather food. It’s past midnight and I’ve finished all the backdating, so I think I’m allowed to turn in now and get some sleep. I’ve been getting enough lately so all life is well. There is peace in the land.

07. 26. LUNCH

Vietnamese summer rolls

Saturday seminar class is great because afterwards we get to pig out like the totally fit and health-conscious college girls that we are. So I think this qualifies as summer rolls because it’s wrapped in lightly cooked rice paper — wait, is that the only prerequisite? At any rate that is what I am going to call them. I would have taken a picture of the wrapped result, but you’re kind of fully occupied when you’re trying to keep that wobbly vegetable mess of a baby safe in its placenta on your hands, so that sort of presence of mind is not going to happen. By the way, this restaurant is amazing. It has fantastic food and the most atrocious service that I’ve ever seen. They nearly refused to seat us, then they wouldn’t stop sneering. If we could have left tips, we definitely wouldn’t have. But the food was so incredible that we decided to put up with all the haughtiness.

seafood rice noodles

I don’t think I’ve ever gotten rice noodles with seafood instead of beef, and it’s actually not bad. The flavor is a lot stronger, and it’s more forthright and spicy than with meat, but it’s got a nice feel of its own. Also I ended up eating pretty much every single mussel in it, and the one shrimp, so I am satisfied with myself. I pretend that was my prerogative for sitting in front of the bowl.

pineapple fried rice

And not in front of this, which you might possibly know that I would murder an acquaintance or two for. Unfortunately it was on the other end of the table from mine, and even the picture wasn’t taken by me, I had to ask a favor, but the two spoonfuls I had were really, really, really, really, really good. No, but I’m not complaining, seriously, I hogged the mussels. And I was too full for much more of the fried rice anyway. Even if I’m not sure that I wouldn’t have stuck a toothbrush down my throat if I’d been offered more.

07. 24. DINNER

capsosiphon fulvescens soft tofu soup (매생이순두부) and rice

Yes, I am going to call it that, so suck it. I despise translating food names with all my heart. Every time it pops up during translation class, I want to punch the language barrier in the face and feed its mangled corpse to a pack of wild dogs. This doesn’t really work out well for maintaining a food blog, but hey, at least I found some name to call it by. It’s actually accurate, though it’s about as intelligible as any other name that you feel like inventing on the spot. The Korean word for it is considerably less confusing. Anyway, it’s a type of algae that’s supposedly super healthy for you, and my mom is a huge fan. We were all wet and tired by the time we got back from my dentist’s appointment — which was why we were in the neighborhood of the Italian restaurant for lunch — and so we gave up on frugality and diligence and just decided to eat out. The tofu restaurant ten seconds away from home was a good choice. Making soft tofu soup with this capsosiphon fulvescens nonsense makes the result not spicy at all and actually pretty refreshing. I don’t know if I can enjoy an entire bowl of it, and my brother won’t touch it because he thinks it looks hideously unappetizing, but the two or three spoonfuls I had were good.

굴전: oyster pancakes

“전” is another word I hate translating. It obviously has nothing to do with pancakes. It’s more of an egg-coating and grilling affair than anything to do with pancake mix and maple syrup. But I rather get a kick out of this gross chasm of logic, so I’m going to go with pancakes here. I grovel for oysters. It’s nearly safe to say that oysters were the only good thing about Baltimore, but not completely safe, because it’s not completely safe to say or do anything in Baltimore. I’ve been eying the oyster pancakes on the menu since the last time I was at the tofu restaurant, and today I decided to get some. God they were so amazing. I totally understand why many, many people think oysters are gross, but it’s just — they’re so — they’re so good. It’s an explosion of taste and it’s — well, you know, it’s like nothing else. Oyster pancakes tone that flamboyant individuality down somewhat, so it’s easier to stomach overall, but it’s so warm and soft and augh it makes up for the loss of distinct flavor. This restaurant makes a mean batch.

yoghurt-flavored ice cream sandwich

Yes, I am also going to spell “yoghurt” like that so suck it. This isn’t a democracy. We went to the bakery ten seconds away from the tofu restaurant to get dessert, and my mom was craving an ice cream sandwich. As soon as we saw the fridge I realized that she was going to get the yoghurt-flavored one and that there was nothing my brother or I could do about it. I guess it wasn’t bad, as far as yoghurt-flavored things go, but I’m not a huge fan and I would have much rather had the green tea flavored ice cream or something along those lines. But here’s a picture — hi mom.

07. 05. DINNER

mapo tofu, rice and stuffball

Szechuan food has a clean heat that I really like. And mapo tofu is one of the nearest and dearest things to my heart in the whole history of food ever. This was picked up from the deli section of the grocery store, since we are just that lazy and refuse to cook anything for dinner as well as lunch. I guess it was okay, but despite my love of that clean heat, I’d have preferred it to be saltier and less, I don’t know, blindingly spicy. It’s a conundrum because if you try to avoid the heat, it’s too bland, and if you put enough of the mapo tofu on the rice to make it salty enough, then you die of the heat. The stuffballs come in handy here, since it helps with the heat somewhat. I guess being tasteless has its uses. Anyway, that was dinner, and we watched The Infinite Challenge. Shamefully enough, I have approximately a month and a half’s worth of backlog that I need to catch up on somehow. It’s just one of those things the virtues of which I could extol in a full-fledged essay. And I’ve finally finished translating, huzzah — now to read over and tweak, for the first time of thousands. Somewhere in the middle of the story I got the idea into my head that it kind of read like “artist-colony noir”, and though that’s hard to explain or justify, the latter half of the translated result contains a dramatic increase in choppy sentences and SVO constructions. Well, maybe that’s just the way the original is — if not, I blame Raymond Chandler.

07. 03. LUNCH

rice, stuffballs (동그랑땡) and picked octopus (낙지젓)

It took me all my remaining energy to pry the jar of octopus open. Not that it was particularly stuck, but I was particularly enervated. But I was dedicated enough to finish The Long Goodbye while I ate. That’s four books already, if you count The Salmon of Doubt, which I doubt I would, but I had readings for class so it amounts to about that much. Philip Marlowe, I am wide open to receive you. Of course in my head he looks like Timothy Gibbs now and that just makes everything that much better. Mostly just funnier, but funnier is better. I’ve got to get more Raymond Chandler. But before that, I should finish the books I borrowed today, which is — a Jack London collection and A Tale of Two Cities. I never did finish Two Cities, or Oliver Twist for that matter. Or Little Dorrit. Or Nickleby. Or David Copperfield. Actually, Our Mutual Friend might be the only one that — no, that’s not true! I did finish Great Expectations. With great loathing. And A Christmas Carol, if that counts.

07. 03. BREAKFAST

동그랑땡: stuffballs

I-I don’t know! But if you make them out of meat and call them meatballs, then either these are meat-tofu-vegetableballs or stuffballs. And I opt for the latter because brevity is the soul of many, many things. Me not being one of them. But of course it is debatable whether I have a soul at all. Tuesdays and Thursdays are so bad for me, there’s never any time for breakfast and I’m back home only by two. Ridiculous! I can’t wait until classes are over, by the end of July. But then it will poignantly strike me that I only have a month left to go and that will depress me immensely. Decisions, decisions.

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.