 How can you bring kimchi to lunch at work without the smell of fermented cabbage? I like the garlic smell of my homemade kimchi, but I’m not sure if I want my office to smell like it. Besides, I’m not a fan of bringing multiple containers to work. I don’t even want people to see me with a fork at my desk, and it’s even worse with an empty but dirty container. The ideal lunch is some kind of finger food, preferably balanced. One afternoon, I decided to make ssam bab, a kind of roll with napa cabbage kimchi outside and stir-fried rice inside that I first saw in Kimchi Family and never in real life. You can find kimbab (rice roll in kim – seaweed) for very reasonable price in the Asian Ghetto just south of campus, but no Korean restaurants in the Bay dish out ssam bab. The only problem: I cut the napa cabbage leaves in half when I made kimchi, so now the leaves are not big enough to wrap up the rice, and things fall apart. Well, if I can’t make it the Korean way, I’m making it the Vietnamese way. Continue reading Rice Paper Kimchi Roll – a cross between ssam bab and fresh spring roll
 A week we waited. Today had the moment of truth arrived. Open the jar we did. Saw some white stuff on the top layer that initially worried us but turned out to be just bits of ground garlic. Off we scraped them anyway, and to check the pickle juice that heavy jar we tilted. Little Mom, who more than anyone I know carrots and bean sprouts and bokchoy pickled has, to me revealed that if the juice is cloudy, the smell “sour in a bad way” and the cabbage disintegrating, into the trash go the kimchi must. But clear is the juice, garlicky and sour in a good way the smell, and crunchy the cabbage. Few moments in life there are when I feel so happy that I get quiet for fear of having mistaken. This is one of those. Followed by a high five and a hug with Kristen. And yes, being someone who hardly ever cooks then succeeding at making kimchi on first try will make you speak like Yoda. On our side the Force is today. Okay, so we tried to follow Dave Chang’s recipe in Lucky Peach #2, but […]
Continue reading White Kimchi for amateurs and Kimchi Cabbage Salad
 Put me next to a pig foot and I turn into a total nut case. But boy, these chunkies, sweet, salty, chewy, just a little spicy… I cleaned the bones until they were white. A feeble attempt at including some starch to our lunch: ground beef and pork coins covered in batter and fried. Dessert: ho tteok (호떡) – chewy sweet pancake with some kind of syrup or melted brown sugar filling, and the best part? They’re not too sweet!
 Yesterday is momentous. Here we are, making kimchi. Is that a big deal? Yes. There’s a joke that if you’re gonna get married into a Korean family you’d better learn how to make kimchi. It’s just pickled vegetables, but it has an entire nation behind its back (and a pretty proud one at that), so you can’t mess with it and expect something good to happen. So here we are, jotting down the recipe from Lucky Peach Issue 2, going to Koreana, buying a clay jar to show that we mean business. Glass jars are so… see-through? (And no, there’s no Korean wedding that I know of… for now. Maybe Kristen will shoot me an invitation to her big day next month with Park Hyunbae and now she’s just using the delicious drama Kimchi Family as an excuse, and I’m her Guinea pig. :-D) But yeah, for now, Kimchi Family is the main reason to our story. It’s a Korean food drama, and it’s delicious. Not only do they show tasty pictures of kimchi glistering and steaming under the sun beam, they make food making seem peaceful! It’s not like Food Network competition stuff where all […]
Continue reading Kitchen hour: Make White Baechu Kimchi
 Movies are food for the eye (and ears, and brain, or whatever else you like). I watched Bread of Happiness on the plane ride from Houston back to SFO, and it made me happy that whole day. It also strengthened my resolve to study Japanese. The breads shown in this movie don’t seem particularly complicated, their presentation doesn’t sparkle, but they perfectly suit the gentle atmosphere that flows through the plot: looking at the steam rising as you break a fresh loaf in half, you can smell a sincere love. Something that I learned from the main guy, a baker, in Bread of Happiness: do you know the literal meaning of “compagnon”? Also designed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, the Korean drama Kimchi Family hits the spot on days when I feel down (and also when I’m eating my cup noodles). It’s another string of small stories of how food made with heart can touch people’s lives in positive ways. If you don’t watch it for the plot, watch it for the kimchi! So many kinds of kimchi that I haven’t thought of being possible before. You can watch […]
Continue reading Food and film: Bread of Happiness and Kimchi Family
 Lately I think I’ve reached a wall in terms of Korean food. To be precise, the Korean food that I can get my hands on, i.e., in the Bay and in Houston. Every Korean restaurant here, in strikingly similar manner to Vietnamese restaurants, has the same menu as every other Korean restaurant. The menu may contain a hundred things, but it boils down to maybe ten, with tiny variations. To be blunt, I’m bragging that I can name practically every dish on a Korean menu in the States. The novelty is gone. Little knowledge is left to obtain. But just as I don’t stop going to Vietnamese eateries altogether, I still like to share a big Korean meal with Mom and Dad. A bubbling jeongol, rice and banchan always give the familiarity that a Western meal cannot. That said, there are a few things that I’m still not used to, such as the scissors. The lady was cutting up the crabs and octopus with big black scissors. I admit their convenience, but I get the weird feeling that she is cutting flowers. Why? I don’t know. Anyway, I didn’t eat […]
Continue reading I can’t think of a title for Tofu Village
 A while ago, I was fairly convinced that of all the different types of spiciness, I can handle the Korean spiciness. Take kimchi for instance, it usually looks scarier than it tastes, and the scorching can be quickly washed away with corn tea. Not an eye was bat when I saw the garnet broth of Il Me Jeong‘s specialty. It’s just loads of shredded beef, sesame leaf, glass noodle, green onions, etc., in a thin soup. Then tears rained down. No more yuk gae jang (육개장) for Mai. Ever. Il Mi Jeong has good unagi don and bossam though. 😉 Go for those instead.
 Between 4 and 6 PM today was the most interesting 2 hours I’ve had this week, and also the most effortless educational experience I’ve had in a long time. That’s how the Korean tea ceremony is meant to be, as I’ve learned: formal but relaxing, and ceremonious but natural. The rules are rather simple to get acquainted to, the movements make sense, and just watching made my mind feel nothing but calmly pleasant. The kind of pleasant feeling one would get gazing off into space alone, on a grassy hillside, on a cloudy day. Now for the logistics. Inje University‘s Traditional Korean Tea Society (TKTS) gave a 2-hour presentation at Berkeley today as part of the “Dew of Wisdom” tour, Stanford and California State University got their tea before us. During the first 40 minutes, the students of TKTS demonstrated two types of tea ceremonies, both accompanied by the slow, deep, hardy rhythm of a 6-string zither 거문고 (geomungo). The first type, 들차회 (deulchahue), is to be enjoyed with friends and relatives outdoor during spring and autumn. The setting is lighthearted, the purpose is to relax and to appreciate nature, […]
Continue reading Two hours with Korean tea ceremony
 Unpredictability #1: “Are you opened today?” Before you set your GPS to Myung Dong in Houston, make sure you call and ask that question in the clearest, simplest way possible. Aaron tried different versions, most were a bit too elaborately polite with a perfect American accent, and only succeeded in confusing the poor old man. I tried it once and got the answer “Yes, open.” We hopped en route. (If you don’t call, there’s a slim chance that your schedule will coincide with the owner couple’s schedule, which depends on the lady’s health, and she’s the only chef. That slim chance didn’t happen for me the first time I set out for Myung Dong.) The limited English conversation is nothing uncommon at Korean and Vietnamese mom-and-pop diners, but I have to mention it because it’s one of those things that make me classify Myung Dong as more “authentic” than the other Korean restaurants in Houston. The second thing is that its name doesn’t contain “Seoul” or “Korean”, they go more local: Myungdong (명동) is a part of Seoul (in Vietnam, its equivalent would be a phường). The third thing is that […]
Continue reading The unpredictable Myung Dong
 Sometimes my craziness surprises myself. I woke up one morning, reflecting that the week’s been warm, and decided to make mul naengmyeon (물 냉면). Weeks earlier, I bought the buckwheat noodles but never had the time to cook, or the mood. Now I still don’t have time to cook, but today is the day. I remember the main ingredients of a true Korean naengmyeon, but just to make sure that I don’t have them, I look at Maangchi’s recipe anyway. Beef bones? No. Mushroom? No. Dried anchovies? No. Kelp? No. Yeolmu kimchi juice? Hah. In my dreams. I don’t even have cucumber. Am I going to the store? Of course not. The wind might blow away my cooking mood, which is already rare as it is. Besides, I have a blind confidence that what I do have will make a fine bowl. The deaf ain’t scared by gun fires, they (we Vietnamese) say. Naengmyeon has three fundamental components: the broth, the buckwheat noodle, and the toppings. The broth needs to be clear and slender. To get the sweetness, I substitute beef bones by pig trotters. They have plenty of bones, and unfortunately […]
Continue reading Korean chilled noodle soup with a few Vietnamese twists
|
|
Blogs we read
|
