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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

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Dang it! Missed Anthony Bourdain!

I heard that Anthony Bourdain, my hero, was planning to shoot an episode of "No Reservations" (Travel Channel) in Korea. He just posted that he has just returned from Korea. And I didn't get to meet him.

So sad.

But here is what he wrote:

Okay, proud Koreans: I just got back from shooting an episode there. I had a fantastic time, developed a deep and abiding love for kimchee, Korean street food and your kooky-krazy party-all-the-time attitude. It was--however, truly dismaying to find out that just about ANY 98 pound Korean girl can drink me under the table. That soju packs a punch!
And next year's "clip show" of outttakes will have some priceless moments: The entire crew--swacked on soju and beer, singing "Anarchy In The UK" in a karaoke room. I will, of course, make sure that my own atonal contributions will be skillfully edited out.

Labels: Miscellaneous

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Monday, March 27, 2006

(Out There #2) Korean Mother Sauces and Stocks by Ji-Young Park (Ya Rayi Our Rai)

I was skimming through the eGullet forums when I came across this article on Ya Rayi Our Rai about Korean mother sauces and stocks. The site spells things differently than I do here, but spelling anything from another writing system is amorphous.

It is a good primer about the basics of Korean cooking. Basically, there are three sauces: Dwenjang (soybean paste, or "stinky miso," as I like to call it), Gochujang (red pepper paste), and Ganjang (soy sauce). And there really are only two stocks used in Korean cooking: Dashi and White Beef Stock.

Read the article for more detail. I couldn't resist posting it here.

Labels: Out There

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Sunday, March 26, 2006

(Tip #1) Time to Kill Some Plants

Spring is here.

That means it's time for me to kill some plants.

I'm a person who loves gardening. Yet I'm not very good at it. In Korea, even though it seems that every patch of dirt is fair game to be turned into someone's cabbage patch, I don't have much luck in finding something. My elderly landlord has claimed all the dirt in front of the little apartment house, and I'm not going to fight him for it. Besides, he seems to be a hardcore gardener, laying out black plastic at certain times and growing beautiful heads of cabbage, even in the throes of winter.

This year, I'm making sure my plants have adequate soil and plenty of morning sun. I'm not going to over water them. I'm going to pinch them back to make them more full. I'm going to... I don't know. Likely some kid playing hide and seek will knock them over in the end.

Getting culinary herbs from the local florists is a survival tip I tell many people to cure the ills of not having many spices available in the pantry. Florists usually have rosemary and mints. This year, I have been seeing more thyme. Two years ago, I saw a good bit of basil, and I have been trying to track it down again.

There isn't a great variety of herbs available, but I can get the basics. It also impresses and baffles the shopkeepers when they ask what I'm planning to use the herbs for. It hasn't caught widespread yet that rosemary tastes as good as it smells and looks. Nonetheless, one of the Korean teachers at my school mentioned using rosemary in her bibimbap to the other teachers, who were amazed.

Labels: Tip

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Wednesday, March 22, 2006

NEW: Google Earth Bookmarks

I've become about as obsessed with Google Earth as many folks. On a few weekends and in my spare time, I have been plotting out many major points of interest in Seoul, including dramatic angles and such. I've also been gradually mapping out the entire Seoul subway (one of the largest in the world) using maps I have on hand. You can even "ride" the subway routes.

I've plotted the restaurants mentioned here, and I plan to plot others as soon as I post something about them.

If you have Google Earth, download the bookmarks from the link on the top of the site, and check frequently for updates.

Labels: Miscellaneous

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Sunday, March 19, 2006

(FFF #13) Gumbo-less Gumbo

So far, this may be my crowning achievement in attempting to mimic foods from home with Korean ingredients. It's also funny that foods I didn't eat much at home I crave badly over here.

Specifically, gumbo.

Wikipedia has a good article on gumbo, if you are interested.

Now, I grew up on seafood gumbo. I specifically remember my grandmother spending all day making a pot of it. She put whole blue crabs in there with shrimp and oysters. I figured that seafood is so readily available in Korea that it would be a sin not to attempt it.

Yet when one thing becomes available, another is hard to find, specifically celery and okra. Okra is a slimy vegetable when cooked and is used to thicken gumbo. In fact, the word gumbo comes from the Central Bantu word kigombo, which means okra. Purists say that gumbo is not gumbo without okra.

But I have no okra, and I don't like okra.

The slimy consistency of okra is used as a thickening agent anyway. I took care of that with a roux. (I also don't have the other thickening agent, filé, but it also isn't necessary unless you're going completely authentic.)

I had attempted gumbo only once back in the States with miserable results. Too many thickening agents. My little sister had made a really good gumbo before I came to Korea. I asked her what her recipe was.

"Um, I just bought some gumbo from the store and added stuff to it."

I researched books I had on hand, specifically Food, Fun, and Fable: Recipes and tales the river country (from Meme's on Bon Secour River) and Bay Seasons Cookbook from the Junior Auxiliary of the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay. I also checked on recipes from Emeril and Tyler Florence.

So, this really was a crap shoot. I had no idea where I was going.

Now, even though I could do without the okra and filé, I needed celery. It's part of the basic mirepoix. Celery is obviously found at Costco, but the rules I follow for the Food For Foreigners is to do it without cheating at Costco. The larger stores, such as E-Mart and Home Plus, sometimes carry celery.

If that is too hard to find, well, the ssam bag usually has celery. It's a bag that's with all the lettuce on display. This is a great product to buy when you're making western food. It's various lettuce leaves for the purpose of wrapping Korean BBQ, and it's cheap. But it is also the interesting lettuces that are used in nice restaurant salads in the west. Look closely at the ssam bag at the local grocery store. There are some celery tips in there, just enough to make a mirepoix.

The first step is to make sure you have time to do all this. It takes a while. It was a strange experience for Eun Jeong. She's used to Korean soups that are instantly thrown together per order at the local shikdang.

"Is it ready yet?"

"Not yet."

"It takes too long."

"It's worth it. Trust me."

I melted a stick of butter in a pan over medium heat and added a cup of flour to make the roux and stirred...

And stirred...

And stirred. They say that making the proper gumbo roux takes as much time as it does to drink a beer. Okay, half done.

There. It's supposed to be the color of chocolate.

While it was turning color, Eun Jeong helped me finish chopping and crushing in the mortar and pestle (what I call the "Wesley Crusher") the mirepoix of celery, two onions, a package of Korean peppers, and a handful of garlic.

I added the mirepoix to the roux. (Why do the French add so many x's that they don't pronounce?.) Cooked that a bit.

Now, here is where we diverge and get to our own little creativities. If you're making a chicken gumbo, use chicken stock. If you're making seafood gumbo, use some dashi.

Since indecision runs in the family, I made chicken seafood gumbo.

I added the roux to some boiling chicken stock.

Eun Jeong and I removed the meat from the chicken used in the stock. I let the stew simmer for thirty minutes.

I then added a package of frozen seafood I found at E-Mart, which included crab, mussels, shrimp, fish, and calamari. At the end, I added some fresh oysters.

I adjusted the flavors a bit with some salt. I also cheated a bit by adding some Old Bay seasoning and Tony Cachere's Cajun Seasoning. But really, the mirepoix and the dark roux are the heart of the gumbo flavor.

Served over rice, it was an amazing reminder of home. Eun Jeong loved it, but she said chicken without the seafood would have been better. I sort of agree. Calamari and mussels don't seem right. But served with a crusty baguette and a cold beer, it's a great relaxer for a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Labels: Food for Foreigners

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(Junk #2) Kimbap -- In Convenient Triangle Shape

These things can be intimidating if you don't know what you're doing. Yet these are great inventions in South Korean junk food. It's called "samgak kimbap" 삼각 김밥, or triangle kimbap.

It's the most basic of basic convenience store snacks. What makes them interesting is that they come in many flavors. New flavors are popping up all the time. You can get Jeonju bibimbap, tuna and mayonnaise, tuna and gochujang, tuna barbecue (my favorite), tuna with fish eggs, charcoal grilled kalbi, chicken kalbi, crab salad --

When I don't have time to eat breakfast at home, I tend to get one or two of these things to rip open before class. And as far as junk food goes, they're not that unhealthy. And at 500 to 700 (50 to 70 cents) won a piece, they're economical.

The trick is opening them, which is something I'm still trying to master. You have to get a fresh samgak for it to work right. But it's always a crap shoot as to whether you have a fresh one. Busy convenience stores tend to have them in the morning. The samgak I'm having for breakfast here is kalbi jjim.

First, peel the strip down the middle, carefully tearing through the label.

Hold the samgak firmly in one hand and grab a bottom corner with the other. Tug it off. Then pull off the other one. Carefully.

If you're successful, you'll have a complete samgak without any of the very salty crunchy seaweed (kim 김) coming off.

Inside is a molded triangle of rice with a dent in the middle. In this case, it's filled with a kalbi jjim mixture. Basically it's cheap (read: throwaway) cuts of pork mixed with spicy sauce. It's pretty good.

Some people like to heat them in the microwave first. I like to have them straight. And with so much rice in there, it'll fill you up for a while. Now, if someone could take this to the next logical step and make samgak sushi.

Labels: Junk

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Thursday, March 16, 2006

(FFF #12) Beer and Sausage Kimchi Stir Fry

Yes, this belongs in the "What Were You Thinking" department. Yet it sort of makes sense.

Sausages = Go well with Sauerkraut

Sauerkraut = Fermented Cabbage

Kimchi = Fermented Cabbage

Therefore,

Sausages = Go well with Kimchi

People are jealous of my powers of logic. Let's try that again.

Great Tea = Tea Leaves in Hot Water

Tea Leaves = Cured Leaves

Cigar = Cured Leaves

Great Tea = Cigar in Hot Water

Genious.

This came from a surprise visit from my girlfriend when I was planning to have a simple sausage and crusty bread dinner. In order to please her, I made it a little fusion. She loves good sausages, but she doesn't like them with simple bread and mustard like I do.

These were sausages I got from the prepped meat section of E-Mart. It's the closest thing to a deli case, next to the weird side dishes case. This case specializes in flavors of dunkass (breaded pork cutlets) and store made sausages. I normally avoided the sausages because many I've had in Korea so far have tasted a little off, as in they used too many fillers. Besides, some of those sausages they had in the display case were green. A cute young lady in a short skirt and what I call Clydesdale leggings was trying to get people to try some sausages she had frying in a pan. This is the strange uniform E-Mart and similar stores have for their aisle girls. They hire these somewhat attractive young girls to dress up as little Sailor Moons to stock the shelves and aggressively hawk their wares.

In the wake of my euphoria in buying the baby crabs and oysters from before, I tried one of the sausages. It tasted good. I bought the 10,000 won ($10) variety pack she was pushing, which included flavors such as bulgogi.

I first boiled the sausages in water topped with some leftover flat beer. There is always a use for old beer and wine. Don't throw them away.

When they were ready, I added them to a pan that already had some chopped onions frying. After browning the sausage, I threw in some chopped kimchi for a quick go. Cooked kimchi takes on different properties, just as cooked onions take on different properties.

The result was not too bad. Eun Jeong loved it. She ate hers with rice while I ate mine with bread. We would have eaten all of it if I hadn't overestimated how many sausages we could eat in one sitting.

Labels: Food for Foreigners

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Monday, March 13, 2006

(KFC #9) Crunchy Baby Crabs and Marinated Raw Oysters

These are just some side dishes I picked up at the local E-Mart grocery store. Really, I had seen the baby crabs in the freaky side dish case and had been wanting to try them. They look like spiders. I was wondering, "Do you eat them with the shell on?"

The answer is YES.

They're not too bad. The shell is like the coating of an M&M -- maybe a bit harder. Yet you can eat them whole. They taste like crab in sauce, sort of. I think they taste more like shrimp. After the novelty wore off, I wasn't that hot about them--

Especially when I had the marinated oysters. These are one of my favorite Korean side dishes. They're salty Korean raw oysters smothered in gochujang, peppers, onions, carrots, and garlic. It's a sloppy dish that could be served at the most discriminating hotels. It's a nice common food in Korea that would be considered more sophisticated elsewhere in the world.

I usually have them with rice at restaurants. Yet at home, they go great with a certain unnamed buttery flavored cracker. That was my breakfast on Saturday.

Labels: Korean Food Concept

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Friday, March 03, 2006

(Street Food #2) Fish Noodles -- On a Stick!

This seems to be the most common street food in Korea. There are others, but selling fish noodles, or odeng 오댕, seems easy to do. It's low maintenance.

Put noodles on stick.

Stick in broth.

Turn on heat.

Odeng is pretty good unless you don't like seafood. It tastes similar to sweet imitation crab meat. It comes in noodle form and shaped into sausage form. It's great in soups and stir fries. And it's a great street snack on a chilly winter day in downtown Seoul.

The method for eating odeng on the street is something I'm still trying to get used to. In other countries I have lived in and visited, you go up to the vendor, pay the money, the vendor gives you your order. At odeng stands, a patron walks up to the vendor, grabs a stick of odeng, and starts eating without even talking to the vendor.

Something in my primieval psyche tells me that's rude.

Basically, you tell the vendor how many you ate, or the vendor looks at the number of sticks next to you. Yes, you could be a jerk and put your stick in front of the other guy while he's not looking.

Eun Jeong and I were walking around Myeong-dong in downtown Seoul, and we were both peckish. This one odeng stand had a very hot spicy broth. The vendors also give patrons paper cups of the broth to drink. What I liked about this stand was that it had a crock of some soy sauce and onion based paste that I brushed onto my odeng with a paint brush. That was darn good and bumped up the heat another level.

A little while later, Eun Jeong wanted to try these other things. I had always seen them but was afraid to eat them because I had no idea what their content was (yeah, me afraid). She told me that it was flour and fish mixed with other ingredients, shaped, and deep fried.

"Like a fish noodle?"

"No, not a noodle."

"But it's like fried pasta."

"I don't know what you mean."

It takes a lot of patience to be my girlfriend.

We tried this one stand that had signs saying that it was once featured on TV. Almost every restaurant in Seoul has been featured on TV.

There was a variety of these things on display. We bought one flavored with Korean peppers. The vendor took one and added a line of ketchup and a line of honey mustard and handed it to us.

It actually tasted pretty good, even with the ketchup and honey mustard. I would order another one of those.

Of course, poor Eun Jeong complains that most of the pictures I take of her are of her eating.

Labels: Street Food

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Wednesday, March 01, 2006

(Rest #3) Globing It in Itaewon

My birthday was Monday. On Sunday, a handful of friends met in Itaewon for an Indian buffet dinner at Chakraa. Yes, it's the same Chakraa that ran the Valentine's Day promotion. As I mentioned before, I'm on their email list. I knew of a special buffet promotion that weekend. In fact, they had knocked down the price even more when we got there.

Earlier that day, my girlfriend suggested we meet in Itaewon earlier. She wanted to get me fitted for a suit she was buying me for my birthday.

Get it? Birthday suit?

Nevermind.

Her job as a tour guide made her an hour and a half late. So I killed time by wandering around, trying to find new businesses (read: restaurants) in Itaewon.

If you don't already know, Itaewon is the neighborhood next to the U.S. Army base. It's set up as a special global tourist village. In reality, it's like a foreigner ghetto. It's not a tourist spot in the sense that Disney-sponsored Times Square is a tourist spot. It's more like the Mos Eisley space port from Star Wars. You know, the one that prompted Obi Won Kenobi to proclaim, "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany."

Nonetheless, it is the place to go to get your international food fix. There was one place that I was looking for and couldn't find. Taco Amigo. It may be the second or third Mexican place in Itaewon, and it's fairly new. I welcome any Mexican alternative to Pancho's, the major Mexican restaurant on the strip. I've eaten at Pancho's twice, and both times the service and food got me depressed. Taco Amigo was supposed to be a fast food taco joint.

As always, I found it right when I gave up looking for it. It's down the street from Burger King, behind Gecko's and Memories German restaurant. The menu is pricier than Taco Bell. But again, the ingredients are much harder to come by. And they are much cheaper than Pancho's.

I bought a beef fajita and a beer. While I waited for my order, a Western looking man with a North American accent walked in and talked to the staff. He looked at me and asked, "What are you reading?"

"Beef fajita."

"No, what are you reading?"

"Oh, reading."

We talked a bit about my book. While I ate, I figured out that he was the owner of the restaurant, Wayne. He seemed like another outgoing memorable Itaewon character, like Gunther from the Three Alleys Pub. We had a great conversation, trading information on how to get Mexican ingredients in Korea. He told me that there is one tortilla manufacturer in Korea.

One.

So I may not have to get frozen dried out tortillas shipped in from overseas. He had to leave before I could probe his brain more as to how to get my hands on these domestic tortillas.

The fajita itself was pretty good. Wayne supplied me with a handful of hot sauces that are difficult or impossible to get in Korea, particularly the chipotle sauce.

The restaurant offers basically tacos, quesadillas, burritos, and fajitas in beef, chicken or veggie varieties. I personally would like to see pork as an option. Pork is heavily used in Mexican cuisine, and I've grown to prefer Mexican food using pork, good fatty pork. And I'm sure it would be a much more affordable menu item in Korea. Taco Amigo is definitely going to be a regular Itaewon stop for me.

I had a few more minutes to kill, so I picked up some lamb at the Foreign Food Mart. It's near the mosque, next to What the Book. It's muslim owned and is a great source for inexpensive Halal lamb. I have noticed that their variety of Halal meats has increased, along with foreign goods outside of Middle Eastern/Pakistani/Indian traditions.

Eun Jeong was hungry when we met. I coaxed her into going for a quick snack at another restaurant I wanted to try, Ali Baba. Ali Baba is up the street towards Thai Orchid. It's an Egyptian themed restaurant with nice decor. We ordered a falafel sandwich and a tabouleh salad.

The tabouleh, to my surprise, had no grains in it. It was nice and light, though.

The falafel sandwich exceeded my expectations. It was light and spicy with a great sauce. And it won by also being cheap. Eun Jeong had never tried Middle Eastern food, but she was impressed and said she would go by there again for lunch, since her office was next door. The service, though, was slow and a bit sloppy. I didn't feel too welcome there, like we were disturbing their lazy Sunday.

We finally met all our friends at Chakraa. I had been here once before, way back when John Kerry was running for President (remember that name?).

The floor manager waited all the tables himself, and he was very patient and personable with our group. The food was good and spicy, not toned down too far for the Canadian clientelle (cheap shot). And there was an endless supply of naan bread. I particularly liked the chick peas and the lamb. I could barely take advantage of the buffet because I had eaten the cuisines of two other countries before arriving.

But I did give it a good shot.

Labels: Restaurant

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