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. 24. SNACK

팥빙수: shaved ice with red beans

We went on another tour boat to a tiny island where they pretended it was the Mediterranean. There was a good deal more uphill walking than I’d anticipated, and the shaved ice was a welcome respite. This is on the other end of the scale from the shaved ice at Napoleon Bakery — it’s got everything on it. Fruit, rice cakes, red beans, little cubes of jelly, condensed milk, ice, everything. And I do not approve of such an abundance. On the whole it was better than the shaved ice from Napoleon Bakery, but only because most things that are intended to taste better do taste better than absolutely nothing. The green tea shaved ice from that place we went to after the crabfest was the best, I should ask where exactly it was, just for reference.

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. 12. DINNER

복분자맛 아이스케키: ice bar flavored with wild strawberry

If I were a mother and captioning these pictures were like raising a child, I would be in jail right about now. I have given up all semblance of prudence. You know, technically, it is an ice bar and they are wild strawberries. Awkwardness is a natural symptom of the period of adaptation! Embrace your unnatural self! Anyway, I remember I had pig feet for dinner on the 12th, but I was really really really hungry and we were watching some sort of Olympic event on TV so I didn’t have the presence of mind to take a picture. This is a big deciding factor in my life: the lack of the presence of mind. Afterwards, when we were relaxing a little and I could think straight, a pang of guilt induced me to take a picture of the dessert, if not the main meal. We bought a couple from Napoleon Bakery, when we had the tasteless shaved ice. These are so much better — the green tea is my favorite, because any sort of dessert flavored like green tea is automatically a winner in my book, but the wild strawberry has a fighting chance.

08. 11. DINNER

bread with olive oil and oregano

I am rather glad that I am backdating all these meals because otherwise these entries might not have been so calm. We had pretty good food for dinner on the 10th (분식) and lunch on the 11th (fondue, or what may pass for it in moments of great hunger) as well — okay, let’s be honest, the fondue wasn’t actually good at all — but pretty much immediately after lunch on the 10th, the family entered one of its spells of yelling. So much yelling. We spent an entire afternoon at the museum because there was too much anger to do much of anything else, and I could feel it in my back for the whole day and all of the 11th. The standing around, I mean, not the anger. But anyway, by dinnertime of the 11th, things had calmed down somewhat so the meal wasn’t incredibly awkward or anything. Yeah, we do that sometimes. Yelling. But I digress. This Italian restaurant is called Bellamonte, another of those places we frequent as a family, and it has infinitely better food than Di Matteo. Score!

insalata caprese

Good times, good times. They told us that they couldn’t make the rucola pizza for us because the rucola that they had wasn’t fresh enough, but confusingly enough there was a whole bunch on top of the caprese salad. I couldn’t really tell that they weren’t fresh, but at any rate, aren’t the vegetables in a salad supposed to be fresher than, you know, the vegetables that get baked in a freaking oven along with massive amounts of cheese? Huh. Anyway, caprese, yay.

insalata di mare

I’m pretty sure that this isn’t the right name for it, but Italian isn’t one of the languages I even pretend to speak and the website seems to be down so I can’t look it up on their menu. We don’t usually order this, we go from the caprese salad to the rucola pizza to the seafood spaghetti with the baked top, but Dad was feeling it and he was paying so we went for it. Amazing stuff. For a restaurant that’s definitely got good food and has even been on TV a couple of times (then again, what with all these food-related shows, it’s hard to find a decent restaurant that hasn’t been on TV once or twice) the place sure is always empty. Also, I forgot to take a picture of the spaghetti with the baked top, which is a pity because it has that huge dough covering and all, but suffice it to say that it went where it was destined to go, namely down my esophagus.

mushroom pizza

And that’s not Italian for anything, but bear with me here. As I mentioned above, Bellamonte refused to serve us anything with rucola on it, except the caprese salad which totally had rucola on it, and we were too hungry to really argue with them so we just went for the mushroom pizza. I mean okay integrity is great but if you give me pizza like this I will definitely shut up. I really wanted to have the rucola, though, so that I could compare it to Di Matteo’s and laugh in the latter’s face. Then again, that means absolutely nothing because somehow they get more customers (must pay off being across the street from a university) and we will probably go there again. Damn you, habit and tradition!

팥빙수: shaved ice with red beans

I have chosen this summer’s keyword to be “정갈함”. This adjective means some supernatural combination of cleanliness, crispness, modesty, purity, and a good deal of empty space. Kind of like wearing nothing but cheap white fabric that’s been washed to a blinding level of whiteness. So in theory, I support this sort of shaved ice, the prevalence of white, the lack of fruit. But to be frank, Napoleon Bakery, your shaved ice tastes like a bowl full of bland. It’s a thin line between my ideal for this summer’s keyword and blandness, and this is still better than Burger King’s travesty so I forgive you, but you will not last long like this. It was a good move infusing the milk straight into the ice so that the shaved ice would have a flavor instead of being so many spoonfuls of water, but for some reason it doesn’t really work. Maybe you need more milk? Or some more of anything, just anything, I mean it’s very tame and it was cold and I enjoyed it, but can’t you do better for four dollars? Must you rob me of my money? Incidentally two hundred dollars was withdrawn from my account and my mother and I panicked and she sent me to the bank before she realized that it was just the automatic withdrawal for this fund that she signed me up for when she created the account. PSYCH

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. 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.

06. 28. DINNER

手巻き: temaki

Our parents were still out partying it up, so in wild resentment we went to the movies. But then we felt kind of guilty so we went cheap for dinner, to the same place that I had buckwheat noodles last time. Or soba noodles. I think they’re the same thing. Anyway, thanks be to the Lord for he has shown me the truth: somehow I accidentally stumbled on the Wiki article for castella, which is what the sponge cake is actually called. Not much to do with custard, but it’s a Portuguese influence on the Japanese. Now I know whom to hate. I mean. Also I hate the makers of this temaki because it was seriously pretty bad. All chewy and soggy and tasteless and generally I decided that you should never enter this restaurant and hope for sushi of any kind.

냉모밀: cold buckwheat noodles

These were fine, though. As usual. Though they’re so watery and also they’re noodles to begin with, so they go down extremely fast and you’re hungry again within the hour. But maybe that’s a good thing for keeping in shape so as long as you don’t eat anything else after the hunger strikes. I tried not to. Except for dessert, because that’s okay, some dessert is fine, I’m telling you.

팥빙수: shaved ice with red beans

It wasn’t even great anyway. Actually it wasn’t even good. We were scrimping but we wanted 팥빙수, so we decided to get it at Burger King instead of at this little restaurant that I used to love to go to but now has turned into some foul bourgeoisie establishment where every meal is an occasion and everything is upwards of fifteen dollars (which is greatly expensive for their portions and their target audience, let me assure you) and to top it all off, they don’t even have what I used to love on the menu anymore, which was this fantastic salad in a long ceramic bowl tossed with thinly sliced brisket and what have you guys done with your restaurant it’s ridiculous screw you guys man. You don’t know what you’re doing. I’m never going there again until I get a ridiculously rich boyfriend who doesn’t know how to say no. In addition, Wanted was ridiculous as well. Remember, kids, you’re nobody until you put meaning back into your lives by becoming an assassin. But it reminded me of Max Payne multiple times for multiple reasons so all was well with the world.