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. LUNCH

insalata caprese

If you asked me to pick my favorite Italian restaurant, my answer would have nothing to do with the quality of the food offered. Alright, so their food isn’t bad or anything, but the fondness that I have for Di Matteo goes miles deeper than that. It’s the first “restaurant” that I remember frequenting, the first place that I felt that we might visit again later and know what to do. It doesn’t even have street cred, it was opened by a celebrity and it’s not a tiny hole in the wall or anything. But we first came here as family, I think, and sometimes I drag friends here just because however vaguely, I can sort of remember that once we were all ten years younger and in the exact same place eating the exact same thing. Also that leads me to believe that this was where I was introduced to caprese salad, which I little knew would become one of the great loves of my life. It’s only halfway to being authentic, but honestly I’m not going to be elitist about a topic that I’m so little acquainted with. Anyway, the taste of basil is something like enlightenment. The smell of rosemary is fulfillment and the stench of sea salt is a battle.

tomato, cheese and arugula pizza

Arugula is the correct word, right? They use the Italian names on the menu and I don’t think they have a Korean name, as far as I know. So this is what we never fail to order, every single time we’re there. And I would call this the best pizza I’ve ever had in my life, despite it being soggy, not quite thin, a little saggy, a little watery for the two mouthfuls that it lasts you. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon — the pizza, or my misguided opinion. But across the street is where my mother works, the roasted chestnuts from the street vendor that I wanted more than anything when I was ten, the School of Nursing, the children’s hospital, the bubblegum and enamel taste of the dentist’s office, the tang of blood in my throat, the rainy walks, and every time we sat down in this completely uncool restaurant just because we knew it would be there. Where else can you get arugula on pizza in this city, anyway? Nobody is a fan of diversity.

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.

salad pattern #1832

Who was it that said that old vegetables don’t die, they just fade away? Well, here’s salad pattern #1832 made from vegetables I have been neglecting for something like a week. It’s definitely not as good as when things are fresh, and actually the mushrooms were kind of gross so I might be heading for salad pattern #1833 which will not include mushrooms. Or will include grilled mushrooms, perhaps, but when not fresh they are not to be ingested raw. Some would argue that under no circumstances are they to be ingested raw; but I am Asian and we make up a great majority of those poisoned by mushrooms worldwide. I must do my duty for Queen and country.

유황오리: sulfur smoked duck

We also bought a pre-packaged thing of duck when we were grocery shopping, because I am a huge fan of duck and I kept dropping hints that I wanted some. My brother likes it, I think, but I think I am the only one so in love with it. Duck is so incredibly greasy and dark and amazing, a different kind of dark from, say, ostrich, the taste of which I memorized carefully so that next time someone asks, I can actually tell them what it tastes like instead of being all “Um, well, you know, I did have it, but it was kind of marinated, maybe, I don’t remember, it was a really long time ago, and we fed the cat bits of omelette, and um, yeah.” Which is embarrassing. I don’t approve of the sesame seeds sprinkled on top, but I am of the opinion that sesame seeds hardly belong anywhere, and certainly not in 90 percent of the foods that they do end up on top of.

06. 22. DINNER

today’s dinner

Salad pattern #1832 makes a reappearance, accompanied by pork, vegetables, kimchi, other side dishes, and the ever-present rice.

salad pattern #1832

Now with extra camembert! The sad thing is that although it tastes fine, the cheese has the consistency of a puddle of water, and refuses to be cut. Instead it settles for kind of oozing along the side of the knife and latching onto the blade. The hidden star of the salad is the cherry tomatoes, I think — they’re super good, really sweet and hard juicy succulent other vaguely perverted adjectives go here.

boiled pork

Today’s meat comes freed from fat. I would never have called myself a particularly big fan of pork, even though I did always like it, but recently I’m beginning to see its wonders. So as long as you take care of all the grease, sometimes it works even better than beef, whose case the free trade fiasco certainly isn’t helping. What does help the universe greatly as a whole, however, is the new tight shirts that the national team (soccer) has — or perhaps they aren’t new, after all I don’t think I’ve watched a single game since the year before last or so. Anyway, it strikes me as just a little silly, but it’s also rather Italian and a girl has needs. Broke even with North Korea. Which is fine, since we’re seeded second anyway. What else is also fine, is that Kim Nam Il. Ugh NIKim you are such a legend, what with your troubled youth and your secret engagements and your staunchly monolingual bullying of American players. I still remember watching that. You small-town mobster, you.

06. 22. LUNCH

salad, pattern #1832

We have a plastic bag full of peeled garlic cloves because they were accidentally left unused when the pickled beef and quail eggs were made. By some odd stroke of luck, I was flipping the channel during dinner one evening and found that they were having a garlic festival somewhere down south. They then proceeded to show the viewers at home the dozens of dishes you could make with their awesome huge solid sweet chunks of garlic. Unfortunately what we had at home is just regular garlic, but really you can make the same food. Today, garlic salad. The base of lettuce, cherry tomatoes and bell peppers is kept, except this time thin garlic slices are stir-fried in olive oil and mushrooms are added when the garlic starts to brown. Add salt, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, some clumps of camembert, parsley and criminal amounts of pepper, toss, stuff face.

06. 20. LUNCH

salad with lettuce, cherry tomatoes, bell peppers and mushrooms

Dressing is olive oil and balsamic vinegar, no questions asked. Mainly because if we ever bought a thing of actual ready-made dressing, everyone would get sick of it so fast that we’d end up throwing out the entire bottle. Can. Tin. Tube. Container thing. This is my healthy lunch, the eating of which was accompanied by the watching of a health-related TV program. All this after an hour of furious exercise in the dungeon-gym. Actually the TV program thing was only because we don’t have cable and all the other channels were even less interesting. I’d rather watch spry old men dance with hula hoops than whatever it was that the other channels were going on about. This salad conspicuously lacks bacon, avocado, pine nuts and cheese among other things, but I have a sinking suspicion that the more of those things I decide to add, the less the salad will resemble a salad. It’ll end up being a bowl of fat. I wouldn’t mind that, if it weren’t for the fact that exercising is way too much work to go to waste.