08. 18. DINNER

canned saury stewed with kimchi (꽁치김치조림) and rice

The first problem lies with the picture; it is blurry. The second problem lies with the caption; it’s not really a stew at all, but even though the word “jorim” is listed on Wiki, I want to keep up the ridiculous outmoded precedence of food translation that I’ve got going on here so that I can continue to use words like “pancake”. The third and final problem is the greatest, and it lies with the fact that this is the beginning of a backlog of epic proportions. It is so epic that if it were a hemorrhage, not only would it kill the patient outright, but the blood would instantly burst out of every orifice in a grisly mess and people from other continents would point and say, Look, a geyser! I have no idea where I am going with this. So 꽁치김치조림 is a super easy way to get rid of old kimchi and all it requires is a can of preserved saury, which is cheap as all everloving heaven. The bones in canned fish are like little pillars of powder, so basically this dish will cost next to nothing, keep practically forever, and not leave anything behind. Also it’s spicy so you don’t even need a whole lot of it. All this only means that if you make a pot, you will have to live on it for a month or so — thankfully we had me, my brother and my father all desperately cramming it down, so we cut the time to maybe a week. I mean, yeah, I like it, I crave it, but honestly I don’t want to spend a month eating canned fish and old kimchi. I have limits on my humility.

08. 13. DINNER

fruit soju, tofu and kimchi, spicy stir-fried chicken (깐풍기), a birthday cake

HOW IS IT THAT EVERY SINGLE TIME I DRINK WE END UP GOING THERE. IS THIS FATE. Though I don’t want to be fighting it, since the only alternatives I could suggest would be tiny dinky cocktail bars where we wouldn’t be able to afford much with the budget from the school, or, you know, beer. And you’re not really often fond of beer. Besides, fruit soju is awesome. So this was my birthday dinner, since I have the translation seminar on Wednesdays — we had the actual meal at Din Tai Fung, my previous visit to which is documented somewhere on this blog, and I would have taken ten gazillion pictures there because we had the deluxe course meal and it was SO. SO FREAKING GOOD. But wouldn’t you know it, I left my camera at home and no one else had one. Luckily someone who did have one joined us, but that was after Din Tai Fung and before the karaoke. Suffice it to say that it was incredible, and so was the karaoke party, and the fruit soju afterwards. I think we had strawberry and mango. Oh, there’s the professor. I am going to miss this class, this city, this land. (But your tendency to withhold movies from me, o Republic of Korea, is not appreciated.)

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. 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.

07. 04. DINNER

rice with beef and white kimchi (백김치)

No, I lied. I’m not going to show you what the new WordPress thing looks like, because frankly it is ugly and also it wreaks havoc with my rounded corners. If they won’t support transparent pngs and they won’t support white backgrounds, then LET IN THE PAGANS AND THE VANDALS what is going on. I will continue to code things this way even if it means that I need to manually a href and img tag my way through. What a martyr. Anyway, I think that this high-pitched supersonic wail coming from my computer’s fan, coupled with my frequent lack of nourishment until close to nine at night or two in the afternoon, along with having half-portions of everything during those meals, is giving me a persistent migraine. This is a problem. The computer situation will be solved soon, hopefully, since it also has a faulty adapter that won’t charge the battery, and a crack down the middle. I don’t know what to do about the eating thing, but classes will be over by the end of July and maybe once I’m okay with my weight (trust me, I have a very reasonable goal) I’ll start eating more. In the meanwhile, I am reading A Tale of Two Cities. 60 pages down so far!

[ETA] OH ARE YOU KIDDING ME? WordPress changes all instances of the word “wordpress” so that the “w” and the “p” are capitalized always. That is so obnoxious! Less that they change it, but more that there’s a capitalized letter in the middle of a word! I hate that for reasons similar to why I hate Comic Sans.

06. 27. DINNER

rice with white kimchi (백김치), beef and pork belly (삼겹살)

I am starving by the time I get home. Today, moreso than usual because I trekked out into the wild populated regions of Seoul in order to register for my German class. It’s in the same neighborhood as the funtime partyland district I mentioned yesterday, and early evening is definitely not a good time to be there. Everyone is coming and going and there is no space to walk at all and I am not joking when I say that it’s the most crowded sidewalk I have ever been on in my life. Actually it is probably always like that near the evenings, but I’m usually not there in the evenings — something that will change, starting on the seventh of July. I’m not looking forward to wading through that mess of humanity six times a week back and forth. If there were less people I might consider shopping around, clothes, shoes, bags, what have you, but as it stands I just want to survive.

06. 25. DINNER

오이김치: cucumber kimchi

We have three types of kimchi in the house right now because that’s what my mother does, she goes to grandma and she steals her kimchi. I’m sure there are filial things done in return, but as it stands, there are three types of kimchi in the house and I really need to learn sewing from someone which is not really related except that perhaps it has something to do with grandma. It’s confusing.

백김치: white kimchi

My absolute love. My favorite thing to eat with meat in possibly the whole wide world. It’s just salty enough to keep the meat from getting boring, but it’s not spicy, which keeps it from interfering with the actual taste of the meat, et cetera, et cetera, other plausible reasons why it is superior to other things anybody might consider eating with meat. Oh, also it prevents cancer, I think. And SARS.

beef

And here is the meat in question. Beef. It was spectacularly tough. But I don’t think anybody noticed because we may or may not have been watching the Duggar family on TV. Wait, that could have been before dinner. Anyway they are so painfully ridiculous that I even feel bad for wanting to laugh. Honestly, Jim Bob Duggar from Arkansas? When I talk about my Mason-Dixon racism, I’m only ever half joking, because half the people actually deserve it. I’m not linking sentences or ideologies here — but that the Duggar family spends three thousand dollars on food every month and fifty-four dollars on dental bills. That amount bothers me profoundly. Why fifty-four dollars? The odd precision of that calculation. Why? I think it’s a diversionary tactic. While we’re obsessing over that mysterious number, she’s just going to go have another baby.

06. 21. DINNER

tofu, side dishes and cucumber kimchi

I’m not complaining, but this meal was so desperately thrown together it wasn’t even funny. Is it pretty much obvious from the picture? We didn’t get started until after eight because Mom was busy doing schoolwork and I was helping, and needless to say there was some resentment brought on by hunger. Somehow, actual crisis was averted. Anyway, that’s family matters, and this is food — the side dishes are all inexplicably arranged on a huge platter and the rice is nowhere to be seen (it was there, of course) but it’s a meal. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have enough time to work on a salad, those vegetables aren’t getting any fresher, hup hup.

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.

06. 14. DINNER

삼합: fermented skate, pork belly and old kimchi

Dinner was had at a nearby restaurant called “Barley Rice in April” or something along those lines. I’d been there once before last year and had the grilled mackerel, which was amazing, but this time we shared everyone’s food which was proportionally more excellent. The fermented skate today was even more laden with ammonia than usual, and as a consequence, the insides of my mouth are like a ravaged war-torn land. You can’t exactly say that it tastes good, but for some reason, you can’t stop eating it. The pork and kimchi are legitimately delicious, of course, but that skate, that skate. It’s like a war.

김치해물전: kimchi seafood pancake

More good times. I’m not entirely sure whether I ate this or not, because by that point we had four or five main dishes all crowded together on the table and I was just eating everything in reach, but I’m sure it was great.

고등어구이: grilled mackerel

And here is my old love. If I had to choose, I’d say that I would rather prefer mackerel as sushi, but grilled with wasabi soy sauce is a very close second. I’m still working on the magical removal of bones skill type thing.

보리밥: barley rice

The restaurant’s raison d’etre, barley rice. It’s funny how many dishes originated from not having anything else to eat. Barley rice is the vestige of autumn harvests, the hill of agony you had to climb in the spring when there was not much grain you could eat. I firmly insist that knodels are also a product of shortage, but I might be biased due to my horrific experience with them.