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I love food. During my time in Korea, I have been collecting recipes and anecdotes about Korean food. I also have been working on survival techniques for westerners living in Korea.

In this journal are recipes for cooking Korean food in Korea or abroad and recipes for recreating western food with Korean ingredients.

But mostly, it's about enjoying life.

SUBJECT KEY
Christmas Chronicles - Trying to celebrate Christmas in Korea
Drink - Imbibe me
Event - Special events involving special Korean foods
FFF (Food for Foreigners) - Recipes for foreigners living in Korea
FP (Food Porn) - Pictures for stimulation
Fusion - A mixture -- or clash -- of cultures
Junk - Junk food
KFC (Korean Food Concept) - A blog entry explaining a type of Korean food
Kimchi - Something about kimchi
KR (Korean Recipe) - A recipe for Korean food, duh!
Miscellaneous - Stuff, stuff, and stuff
News - Korean food in the news
Out There - What others are saying
Rest (Restaurant) - An entry about a restaurant in Korea
Street Food - An entry about a street food concept or adventure
Tip - A survival tip for living or visiting Korea
Video - A summary of a video on the site
WTF - A feature on anything unusual that has to be investigated further

Monday, December 12, 2005

Christmas Chronicles: Egg Nog

I'm one of those people who really loves egg nog. Back home, I would buy cartons and cartons of the stuff when it was in season. I once had homemade egg nog, and I didn't like it. I missed having egg nog last year, so this year I thought I'd figure out a good way to make it myself with what's available in Korea.

Luckily, Alton Brown's Good Eats recently had an episode all about egg nog. He had a raw version and a partially cooked version. I would prefer the raw version, but it required either having an electric mixer or a whisk with biceps of steel.

The most difficult part of this recipe is getting your hands on nutmeg. You can make it without nutmeg, but any egg nog afficiando will tell you that it's the main flavoring that separates nog from melted ice cream.

And that's basically what egg nog is: an ice cream base. And an ice cream base is a custard.

I myself have a stash of nutmeg I got sent in a care package from home. Nutmeg may also be found in a large grocery store (I have seen it at E-Mart), Hannam and the other Itaewon international markets, and the import food stalls at Namdaemun.

The partially cooked version is not (as of this moment) on their web site. So I'll transpose how I did it based on Alton's recipe.

In a pot, I put a pint (half a quart carton) of milk and half a teaspoon or so of nutmeg to boil. Alton's version also used heavy cream. Heavy cream is close to impossible to find here. Besides, Alton complained that the cooked version was very thick. So why have the heavy cream if it's too thick?

While it was heating, I separated four eggs into separate bowls, being careful that no bits of yellow got into the whites. Alton showed an easy way to do it using a slotted spoon.

To the yolks, I added 1/3 cup of sugar, or enough sugar to fill a Korean tea cup. With a whisk, I briskly stirred the sugar and yolk mixture. It helps to put the bowl over the heating milk to dissolve the sugar. I beat the yolks until they reached ribbon stage, where a string of yolk formed when lifting the whisk. It sort of looked like vanilla pudding.

Do not turn your back on the milk, or it will boil over.

As soon as the milk boils, I turned off the heat. If you immediately mixed the cold yolk mixture with the hot milk, you'd end up with scrambled eggs in milk. I added a ladle full of milk to the eggs and stirred to temper the eggs. After three or four ladles, I stirred the egg mixture into the milk.

While the milk was cooking, I washed the whisk and proceeded to whip the egg whites until they formed stiff peaks, like a merengue. After I added some beef to my arms from whipping, I stirred this into the milk mixture, put it in a pitcher, and chilled it.

Alton's recipe calls for putting 1/3 cup of bourbon into the whole thing. I prefer to mix the alcohol by each glass. You can use many kinds of alcohol. Bourbon is the traditional American booze. But it also tastes good with dark rum, brandy, and any kind of whiskey. Right now, I'm using some cheap scotch, and it works well.

Labels: Christmas Chronicles, Miscellaneous

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Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Upcoming Kimchi

Just taking a small break.

There are some entries I'm wanting to do and other things that are down the line. I thought I'd make some comments about what's coming (so I'd be obliged to come through with them) and answer some questions that I've gotten.

Kimchi
Kimchi is, well, the Big Kimchi, of Korean food. I have grown to love kimchi. I would even say that I'm a connoisseur of it, where I can taste subtle differences in aging and techniques. I also have my own preferences.

We are in Kimjeong, the kimchi making season. I was hoping to come up with something, but this whole thing has become a rush. And I don't want to make a big entry about making kimchi while I'm still so ignorant of the whole process. I have a connection that will hook me up with learning how to make it. But until then, kimchi is just too large a subject to tackle for a waygook like me at this moment. It's like jumping into France and instantly pretending to be a cheese expert. I know I love it. More on it later.

Dwinjeong
It's spelled many ways: Daenjong, Dwenjeong, Dwaenjang. It's a fermented soybean paste. I call it the stinky miso. I used to, um, well, I didn't hate it. But when my girlfriend said she was in the mood to eat it, I said I was in the mood to eat something else.

Now I'm obsessed with it. I can't get enough. I want to do a big ass tribute to the stinky miso. That will be coming soon. Very soon.

Reference Database
I only use Blogger for the Food Journal out of convenience. The rest of the web site I program myself (with help from Macromedia Dreamweaver), including the main ZenKimchi blog. I'm planning to create a database to continue work others have been doing to both have a guide to translate Korean foods and ingredients and to make it easier for people to find and cook foods in Korea. That's a big project, and I would love some help on that. Not on the programming side but with gathering information about what is good in your neck of the woods and places where to score hard to find items (other than the obvious Costco and Itaewon import markets). For example, there are two Chinese groceries off of Beongchon station, west of Sadang on the Green Line, where you can find cilantro and whole seed cumin. Stuff like that.

The Name
Since 1994, my name on the internet has been Zenpickle. So many people know me as "Zen," that my third born child's legal name is Zen.

Really.

So when I moved to Korea, it was logical to shift the name to ZenKimchi. There really is no deeper meaning than that.

The Picture
The little zoom out flash movie on the navigation bar (look at the top of the page) is kaegogi -- dog soup and steamed dog meat -- from a meal in August 2004. More pics are in the pics section (go figure).

Why?
Of course, I love food. I have also been a fan of the FatMan Seoul blog. It is highly entertaining, and I doubt I could ever match his writing style. I wish I got to meet him. But he has left Korea, and he no longer publishes this particular blog. I want to see if I can continue the work he has already started.

Links
Yeah, there are some adverts on the site. I've noticed the Google ones have become more relevant. But the ad for the T-shirts is for stuff that I've personally made, and the money from T-shirt sales directly pays for the site. The producer is based in the U.S. I'm looking for a T-shirt printer in Korea to make some for the local waygook population. T-shirt sales, so far, have been good, but they can get better.

Also, there are some great bloggers and references in the links section on the right column.

Labels: Miscellaneous

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Sunday, December 04, 2005

(Rest #2) Yeontan Kalbi -- Ansan

There is a restaurant I discovered late in my first year in Korea. Actually, I had known it existed, but I heard from someone it was a vegetarian restaurant, so I steered clear of it.

Jeremy and Liz then informed me it was a kalbi restaurant, and a good one at that. I never walked on the side with the sign. I guess that's a signal of my own laziness, if anything.

This is a cool place. It looks like a log cabin hunting lodge. In the middle is a stove filled with burning logs, which heats the place. In the winter, the open air windows are covered with thick plastic. The inside has a hickory smoky atmosphere with a dirt floor and high ceiling.

Eun Jeong, my girlfriend who has a bit of a snobby side when it comes to restaurants, doesn't like this place, which is exactly why I like it. One thing she does like about it is that they roast sweet potatoes in the fire stove.

Okay, now location. This is located in Ansan, in between Handaeap (Hanyang University at Ansan) and Seongnaksu stations. It's behind the Seowon Tourist Hotel. It's not a convenient walk from any of the stations, so get a taxi to take you to the hotel. At the hotel, just look for a log cabin looking building.

It's funny because it seems to cater to high-paying hotel guests, and I have seen many business types there. But it also has the feeling of the dive at the edge of nowhere. Jeremy and Liz have been known to adopt some of the stray cats that frequent the place.

Recently, we went back to Ansan for a Friday night dinner. Injoo asked where to go. I insisted on this place, and everyone agreed it was a good choice. Injoo said it was good because it was one of the places that used charcoal fire for the meat.

The atmosphere was great, but the food was underwhelming a year ago. This time, though, the food had noticeably improved. The kalbi has more flavor, and they were generous with the daenjeong chigae. The kimchi was also very good, which is always the mark of a quality Korean restaurant.

The service was a bit slow, but they explained to us that they were making everything fresh for us. The soup was being made from scratch. I was so ecstatic over the daenjeong chigae that they gave me another bowl for free.

We finished the meal with some of the famous roasted sweet potatoes. They were very hot and charred. That was great on a cold winter evening (it started snowing later). Injoo said that the best way he remembered from his childhood to eat these was to put kimchi on them. Lars and I tried this experiment. He liked it. I felt it tasted like, um, kimchi and sweet potatoes. Eun Jeong later said it was a very country thing to do.

And what's wrong with that?

Labels: Restaurant

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