09. 05. DINNER

순두부찌개: spicy soft tofu soup

So this is what I leave with, the tofu restaurant down the street. We ate out. I think it’s a fitting last supper for this summer vacation — something unassuming, something close to home. You know, I used to hate going home in high school. I used to wish fervently that I’d be allowed to stay in the dorms, when we were sent home once a month. But then, as soon as we moved, I stopped hating it. Maybe it was because our new house was more spacious, maybe we had more room in our hearts afterwards, but that can’t just be it. I think it’s because we used to live here, in this exact spot, and then we had to move five minutes down the road because they were rebuilding the apartments. It’s just five minutes’ distance, but I think that all along, I couldn’t really forget that one day we would move out and back to our old home. And I think that it’s the same for this town, or this city, or this country — there’s a feeling that some people say they got when they met the love of their lives. That they’d be together for a very, very long time. I think it’s something like that. And everywhere else is just somewhere to rest your feet, a pause along the way. The heart’s been left at home. But in the meanwhile — on the road — keep moving, because if you stop, then you’ll start thinking. And if you start thinking, you’ll start being sad. So keep moving; drown out the white noise one day at a time. There are people who love you, no matter what gets in your way, so forget about everything else and the thousand terrible moments ahead of you. This is for myself, the only person I’m qualified to give advice to. You have your duties and to stay strong is one of them. Clutch, love, and sometimes you can cry. But in the meanwhile remember the love — think of the food, it’s all the same. It’s all good memories so keep those the best you can, even if you have to drown out everything else being gone. Focus. Hold that chin up. It will all wait for you.

09. 02. BREAKFAST

tofu with soy sauce

Not the same kind of tofu that I usually get, this is harder and has a different purpose, but the portion is much smaller so it’s better to have for breakfast when you decide that the bread isn’t quite good enough to have two days in a row without inciting some sort of negativity from you. Completly unrelated to this (I hope), we’ve been reading 20th Century Boys to prepare for the upcoming film. So far we’ve been ashamed for knowing not much more about it than the word FRIEND and THE END OF THE WORLD. But Jesus God it is so epic. It’s got some flaws, or at least some elements that make me react in something less than awe, but the scale of the story is mindblowing and it’s genuinely emotional sometimes, and also it’s just ridiculously cool. It almost nearly makes me want to read Monster. TOMODACHI TOMODACHI, suckers.

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. 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. 14. DINNER

soft tofu (연두부) with rice and soy sauce

Didn’t I say something about being enervated before dinner, in the post before this one? What a deceptive word, that “enervate”. Kind of like “flammable” and “inflammable” — or like “peruse” — well, I believe that when a word changes meaning in the popular mind, then the word changes meaning. Where things are going is a bit more interesting than where they’ve come from. At any rate, this is the result of that enervation, I had all the willpower it took me to open up a pack of tofu, upend it over a bowl of rice, and then drizzle some soy sauce over the entire soggy mess. Not much more than that, and I used what was left to actually ingest the food. The trouble with me lately is that I am not quite on top of my game in terms of physical condition, but there’s so much I want to do. School, school work, that’s nothing, I’m not even getting graded for it. But I want to make this translation job something really worth reading — want to tutor kids the way they were meant to be tutored (but is that worth sixty bucks an hour?) — I want to drink in this city because half of summer break is gone. I want to live at the mall, sleep in the movie theater, eat my meals out of a paper bag in the bookstore. But I have a sinking feeling that the worst is a far bigger problem than these ambitions; John Woo is dragging me down. It’s happening, Jesus God it’s exactly like every time it’s happened before — you find something, you like something, and the next thing you know, you have an entire bookcase full of sources you’ll never look at again, a dozen stammered half-attempts at writing, you’re ravenous and you want to know everything there is about it and everything that anyone has ever said or even thought about it and everything everything everything and you just don’t sleep because there is so much out there. Once I asked my mother’s grad school thesis advisor to check out a book for me and photocopy it from cover to cover, and then to Fedex the pile of paper to me. I haven’t looked at it since. And I know it’s going to be transient, it’s just a thing like a crush, but sometimes it just doesn’t go away that quickly and what else can you possibly do but try to appease that sort of wildfire? It’s probably not a good idea to feed it, but it’s so, so, so incredibly hard to douse it. The only solution is to move onto some other newfangled madness just as abruptly — or to realize that you’ve just gotten a 75 on your computer science midterm because you tried to take it without studying a single lick because you were too busy being obsessed over whatever the hell it was that you were obsessed about, hello genius. So now I am at a crossroads. I can either buy a ten-volume set of books I will devour in a frenzy and then stuff in a dark corner somewhere, or I can try to go to sleep. Please, God, please convince me to do the latter. Or even, please just let me think about something else at all. I don’t blame John Woo; I blame that girl in eighth grade who silently put a comic book into my hand, then replaced it with a fantasy novel when I was finished, then replaced it with an empty notebook when I was finished. You ruined my life; now instead of amounting to anything worthwhile, it’s fun. Was I talking about tofu and rice?

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.

06. 28. LUNCH

새우볶음밥: shrimp fried rice

My brother and I were resenting the fact that our parents were going to a Japanese restaurant after golf, so we decided to eat out. But we weren’t angry enough or courageous enough to go to the conveyor belt sushi place, so we — no, no, wait, that wasn’t the reason, we didn’t go because it started raining. Yes. Kind of. Well, it was wet. Rain is wet. Anyway, we went to the tofu place which is literally ten seconds away from the entrance to our apartment complex. It opened up relatively recently, while I was in college, and it has the heartfelt recommendation of my father. I trust that because he is a picky eater. So we went and we got food.

순두부찌개: spicy soft tofu soup

This is the main event, but as I am not too good with hot things or spicy things, I decided to get a small-sized version, with the shrimp fried rice as mentioned above. My verdict is that whenever anybody ever wants to meet me in this neighborhood, I am taking them here. It’s tofu, so it’s very reasonably priced, the service is super fast, there is an entire drawer of cutlery built into the tables, and the food is amazing. The problem is, though, that there might not be room. We had a ten-minute wait, but luckily we were only two so we got seated first. It is my goal to try many, many, many other things on their menu.

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. 18. BREAKFAST

tofu and soy sauce with scallions

Oh my God you lazy fool. Tofu is amazing but I am not so sure that it qualifies as breakfast food. Nevertheless, it’s so amazingly convenient especially when the soy sauce is already made and all you have to do is take two things out of the fridge and find a spoon from somewhere. Also something I am not sure of is whether so much protein is conducive to this whole losing-weight thought that I’m entertaining, but surely it can’t be worse than a plateful of bacon. That’s what I tell myself whenever I err on the side of sin — surely it can’t be worse than a plateful of bacon. Adultery? Think bacon. Fraud? Think bacon.