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. 27. DINNER

boiled pork and rice with a stick of cucumber

Look! The cucumber is growing out of the rice! It’s nothing but honest magic. I guess it’s a pretty average meal and I was enjoying the cucumber sticks because cucumber sticks are awesome if they’re accompanied with the bean paste of choice wait actually they are still awesome without the aid of any condiment but seriously it goes from side dish to mere vegetable without the bean paste and I’ve started rambling about things again but wait, this isn’t what I was set to ramble about. We were watching TV and we had the right time slot to catch all the food-related shows, and they had this special on this one fish I have no idea what the English name is, Wiki says “hickory shad” but have you ever heard that name before? Because if it’s as common as it should be, non-fishermen should be well-acquainted with the name too, but at any rate, it’s that fish, and it’s just coming into season now that fall is coming, and the fish are fattening up and they’re being caught by boatfuls and oh god when you watch them flop it’s like you can taste them in your mouth. The sashimi looked phenomenal, I love the kind where they slice up the little bones along with the skin and Jesus God just talking about it is driving me insane. Gluttony has its own circle of Hell. I would post a picture but I’m kind of desperately hoping that I can have it somewhere before I leave and also talking about it has made me too depressed to work up the energy to resize the picture. Farewell, cruel blog.

08. 26. DINNER

steamed king crab

Happy birthday to my brother. For several days he couldn’t make up his mind as to what he wanted to eat for his birthday dinner. This indecision is a concept strange to me, and I tried to force him to decide by asking him every two minutes. He grew tired of that really quickly. Then I started suggesting options, all of which ended up being seafood, and he looked at me levelly and was like, We just came back from a crapload of seafood. And I was like YEAH BUT YOU DON’T GO NAKED JUST BECAUSE YOU WERE CLOTHED YESTERDAY and that made so much sense. We haven’t had king crab since the last time we brought two steamed to our grandmother’s (maternal) place, and that must have been at least the year before last because I wasn’t home for Thanksgiving last year. These are really convenient because they steam them for you at E-Mart when you pick them out, and they’re really economical considering that two are more than enough for the entire family to stuff its face like war refugees. Unfortunately our father wasn’t home, but we partied anyway. HA.

crab innards and rice

This is so the best part of the entire crab. It’s in the body, close to the head part of the shell (is that even the head for crabs? It’s like I never took bio) where the eggs are — that’s the, you know, the stuff that looks like eggs in the above picture — and the super flavorful flesh. I will term this the “breast-to-rest conundrum”: which to choose, chicken breast or the other parts of the blasted bird? In this case, though, the legs of the crab would be analogous to the chicken breast. They’re meatier, but the flesh is slightly drier, (though of course it’s not really dry at all, if it’s good steamed crab, you don’t even need to scrape the meat off the shell) and it’s considered the more conventional part to eat. But I’d probably trade in all the legs for the body — it’s great, there’s just so much more taste to it, and I adore that slightly bitter edge. It’s just like pickled crab, really, the body also goes a lot better with rice. Mmmmmmmm, birthdays. I’m eating a lot of crab this vacation, and that reminds me of when I was going to take the Spanish proficiency exam and all we could think to suggest as examples when we were preparing was CANGREJO CANGREJO CANGREJO and it became a running joke and we were going to get some after the exam, but — aw, what a sad ending.

08. 25. DINNER

marinated pork rib and rice

No way, I haven’t had this so far this vacation? I find that hard to believe. Maybe I forgot to take the picture. But anyway we were trying to think of what to have for dinner and I thought maybe pork ribs would be nice, because we hadn’t had it in a while, definitely. So I bought some and we asked the Deaconess — wait, wait, wait, that sounds really, really confusing. Back up there. So. We’ve had hired help around the house since we were little, because we couldn’t be expected to cook and clean for ourselves at the tender ages of whatever it is that you consider a tender age. Back then we were living next to our grandmother’s place and we were all attending the same church, so the lady that helped was a friend of our grandmother’s from church. We weren’t taught to call her “grandmother” despite the term not being exclusive to relatives, I don’t know why, and we always called her “Deaconess” — wow, that sounds so incredibly odd in English. Like it’s a class of the nobility or something. Anyway, we’ve had two or three different ladies since then, not all of them acquaintances from church, and I guess maybe it was just a form of respect to call her “Deaconess” because I think we called the second one “grandmother” for sure. The lady who helps us now (since although we can grill things and cook rice and get the basics out of the way, we’re not skilled enough to make side dishes or kimchi or the like) is another Deaconess acquaintance from church, though, so we call her — okay enough about this. What was I talking about — yes, the pork ribs. So what we wanted was pork ribs marinated and boiled in bean paste, but while I was being exhausted from the walk in hot weather, my brother took the ribs to the Deaconess and promptly forgot to say anything about bean paste. Soooo we ended up with the spicy version, which we’re also fond of, but it gets on your hands so much — I have no idea why this entry is so long. I’m going on and on about deaconesses, what.

명란젓: salted pollack roe

Speaking of deaconesses, though, I think this is the food I most strongly associate with my early childhood. I have no idea why we had so much of it, or even if we actually did, but I have a feeling it was present at the majority of meals. And when I recall that we used to bounce around like rubber on the couch and try to sing along to the theme song of the cartoon on TV and generally refuse to eat dinner, the spoon masquerading as a train usually had rice and salted pollack roe on it. Now that I think about it, what an odd thing to try to feed little children. But we never had much of a sweet tooth.

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. 24. BREAKFAST

육개장: yukgaejang

That is much too sensible a caption for my tastes, but I am a bit worn out from the ranting in the previous post and you can always Wiki the word if you’re really curious. I see no reason why you should be, or would be — pretty standard fare. The only two things on the breakfast menu for the hotel were this and the beef rib soup from the day before. I think they’re being considerate to those with hangovers, but it’s ostensibly a family hotel and there were only two other groups we encountered that were lodging there, both families with tiny children. Anyway, again the soup was boiling hot and I wept to have to wait. But it was good. Honestly, I am all typed out for today but I still have a couple more posts lined up so bear with me if I don’t gush about everything I ever ate, even if it was very, very tasty, thank you Geoje Family Hotel.

08. 23. DINNER

해삼내장비빔밥: rice with sea cucumber innards

You know that song, I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight — sing it, but mean it, banish all sinking suspicion from your mind that the metaphor might be old hat or that the sentiment might be cheesy. You think I might be kidding but really I am not. I have been whining about this dish for longer than I can remember. Definitely it was on my mind last summer vacation, when I was home for too short to even have pickled crab, let alone hunt down this. I’ve been talking about wanting it nonstop to family, to friends, professors, the whole shebang. I think I first saw it on TV a couple years back, and it was overshadowed by the second item in this blog entry, the pickled sea pineapple with rice. But there’s a reason that this costs two and a half times more than that, and that’s, um, because more sea cucumbers go into this than sea pineapples go into that — but that’s not my point, my point is that this is going to be one of those foods that I fantasize about aimlessly in my moments of dire pain. This is why we went down south, a part of why I came back home, why it is acceptable for me to complain so much in the previous post — because this is seriously insane. It’s crazy. It’s absolutely unbelievable. We found the restaurant driving down a city street and decided that it was trustworthy because it had been on TV thirty-two times. Turns out that it’s the restaurant the camera crews turn to when they need to do a summer special on summer foods you can only find in certain regions. They usually are more interested in the sea pineapples, but they are wrong. I really want to rave about the taste, but it’s just — it’s so subtle that I can’t, it doesn’t even taste like sea cucumbers, or salty or briny or fishy or anything at all, it’s just… a barely-there hint of something incredible, and you’re through the entire huge freaking bowl before you can pin it down. Oh my god. I’ve only had it once so I am rather afraid to place it on the same pedestal as pickled crab, but if that was the known reason behind this blog and these summer months, this represents everything unknown. This is everything good about trying new foods. Forget traveling to exotic locations, or taking wild risks, bungee jumping, parachutes, whatever. Food is where it’s at. The amount of danger involved in the adventure has nothing to do with what you’re left with later — it’s not about the adrenaline, it’s about a sensation closer to your skin. Does this make any sense at all? Taste is intimate, and there’s good cause for that. Honestly, it’s been two days since this meal and three hours since I’ve started working on these backlogged posts, but all I can do is hope that May 2009 comes as soon as it possibly can. Or I’m going to find a restaurant in my neighborhood that serves this, by this point I’d be happy to spend all my tutoring income on food and nothing else.

멍게젓비빔밥: pickled sea pineapples with rice

And here is the runner-up, photo courtesy of my brother. So this was good too, but really I have no idea why anyone would be talking about this when they can have the sea cucumber innards. I appreciate sea pineapples, and I’d say that I like them, if I were asked, but they quickly grow to be a little too much. Normally I am all for the unapologetic taste of the sea, and that’s what I do like about the sea pineapples, but it’s a very mood-specific food. Unless you’re in the right frame of heart and stomach to get through an entire bowl, I feel like this is going to be more of a chore than it should be. It was very good, and maybe to someone that likes sea pineapples more than I do, it is every bit as amazing as it has the potential to be. But I’m going to stick with the sea cucumbers. If I hadn’t felt so guilty I would have greatly enjoyed some slices of actual sea cucumber to go along with the meal, but yes, the guilt, and also I was too busy having my mind asploded by my new southern love, thank you. I’m acutely aware than the first picture isn’t all that great, actually it’s pretty bad even by my standards, but the camera was pretty much forgotten for the rest of the meal and I didn’t want to waste time redeeming myself. And then Korea ridiculously won the gold medal in freaking baseball, out of all things, so somehow it never rains, but it pours. Oh God take me back. (I think that will set the tone very nicely for the next nine months.)

08. 23. BREAKFAST

갈비탕: clear beef rib soup

Clear beef rib soup. It is ridiculous. I love it. The hotel we stayed at had two options, either you could reserve a room with a kitchen unit, or you could get a room without one but with breakfast service for free. Since obviously we weren’t going to be cooking anything anytime, we went for the latter. The hotel is situated amazingly, ours wasn’t the super magnificent best suite in the building exclusive partytime room or anything but we had this utterly gorgeous view, and those pictures aren’t going to be on this blog but seriously, this was such a great vacation. They served breakfast in the little cafe attached to the hotel, charming cushions, flowered wallpaper and everything. For all that the breakfast menu was stubbornly Korean, but I liked it. You need something hearty for a day’s worth of sightseeing. The catch was that they brought the food out to the table while it was still boiling fiercely, and since I am not so good with hot foods I had to let it sit for a long excruciating while until it was edible, and even then it was incredibly hot, but ugh so good. James Franco, where are you when I need you?

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.