Let`s talk about Food

At the moment, I am rereading Julia Child`s "My Life in France" memoir about living in Paris and Marseilles after WWII and all the food and cooking she experienced while there. I feel to be a kindred spirit in this sense, because I just returned from Korea, a country with a rich and varied cooking heritage that I was able to partly experience during my brief and torrential trip this past month. There was a simple symphony of flavors, foreign and domestic, that rose to my lips over our eleven day journey.

This is not the actual bibimbap I consumed, but it is quite close.

On our first working day, we had bibimbap for lunch. Bibimbap is a mixture of veggies, pickled things, sprouts, and egg over a bed of rice. You can adjust the level of spiciness to suit your own taste using the included side bowl of red pepper paste that you are supposed to generously dollop into your bowl before you begin mixing. I was sparing in the addition of my pepper, painting the whole ensemble only a faint cherry color while my friend Hyeungen drowned hers in a veritable blood bath of spice. "Bibimbap is supposed to be RED!" she cajoled at me, while I timidly spooned another small portion into my bowl. I was trying to be brave, but I wasn't yet very good with spicy things (and let's be honest, I still am not). Japanese food is just not spicy. The textures are what put westerners off it. Raw fish doesn't agree with everyone and many people find Japanese food relatively inaccessible. Korean food is rather more mainstream in texture, but definitely more of a fireworks festival inside your mouth.   

Every meal was an adventure of sorts. There were no rock-solid plans for any given moment of the day. On occasion, my friend would say she had a meeting later, but for the most part, everything was free-flowing make-it-up-as-you-go-and-pencil-it-in-for-later. But meals were calm islands in the swirling social current of church affairs. You might work until after midnight and get up again at 5.30 the next morning, but it was inconceivable that you would skip a meal. And if it took two hours to head out to that barbecue buffet, so be it. If you felt there wasn't time to head out, then you could eat in the church cafeteria or order food. Korea is very small and the people are very impatient. Any kind of food can be ordered from any restaurant at any time and be delivered within thirty minutes, piping hot, regardless (apparently) of the weather, by little dudes on red scooters, running red lights and shedding paper napkins behind them like old plumage off molting parrots. "Polly wanna, get the hell out of the way! I gotta deliver this! Kahmsammida!"

Some nights we ordered a pizza – spicy as hell chicken, potatoes, broccoli, and a modge-podge of other non-pizza ingredients. When we worked late, it was fried chicken, teriyaki or tandoori-flavored, with toothpicks for forks and cans of coke to wash it down and keep us up. McDonald's and Domino's (dominos?) came to the church regularly; we had standing orders with several establishments, I found out. People can live at the church if they want to. There are dormitories for sleeping, boys and girls separately, and showers on the premises. The fully-functioning cafeteria downstairs produces rice en masse and fifty thousand kinds of kimchi every day. We ate every kind of kimchi, rice, more bibmbap, tonkatsu, soup, fried tofu, sprouts, sprouts, and sprouts, bitter vegetables, and more spicy stuff.

If you want to go out to eat, you have a plethora of options. Coming from a small town tucked into the rice paddies with only one restaurant that serves the train station some tempura udon, and only a few mom-n-pop shops in the neighboring towns, I found myself overwhelmed with choices that are routinely as out of reach as an hour-and-a-half train ride into Kochi, or a three-hour ride to Okayama. Once we went to a barbecue buffet place with a mix of different styles, meats, and regional flavors. Another time, we went to a seafood restaurant, but Hyeungen was reluctant to over-do the fish side of Korean cuisine because, let's face it, I live in the fish capital of the world.

The Korean ability to pick and choose and mix and fuse the best parts of the cuisines they liked was also appreciated. We went to a chabu-chabu (Japanese boiling method) Vietnamese fusion place and made our own rice paper spring-rolls with sprouts and veggies and beef and spicy sauce. 

First, you dip your rice paper in a bowl of warm water to soften it.

Then pile veggies and meat into it. Roll it up and presto:

I had coffee and espresso whenever I turned around. We had bread for breakfast, from an EXCELLENT French bakery, little airy yeasty melon-pan looking cakes, mochi with goma seeds, chestnuts and walnuts, a super crisp on the outside chewy and airy on the inside baguette with creamy sweet milk filling, warm dutch crunch rolls with cream cheese inside, soft white-bread cheese rolls, a sweet red bean paste filled nutty bread, and sandwhiches that were delicious. For dessert, it was frozen yogurt, ice cream, or an iceberg treat which I remember from Texas, but didn`t like as much then. A glorious little fountain of shaved ice with red beans, fruit and sweetened condensed milk all mixed up. So good!

We had ice cream for snacks at work, green tea ice cream and soda flavored ice cream (which tastes like bubble gum, bleh, but was novel at the very least). We had burgers at this burger place, two beef patties and a thick slice of juicy onion and tomato and cheese, no bun. I mean, why waste precious space on simple carbs? 

For lunch on Friday in Seoul, Esther and I had Italian food. I had a lasagna that was basically a lasagna with risotto rice instead of pasta and it was AMAZING. She had a garlic pasta, we both tried to pound down a pizza with extra cheese and brie. We couldn`t finish it all, but damn, we wanted to. After Independence Hall (see later post) we had a sort of beef stew that was basically mouth-meltingly tender pieces of beef on the bone and you pulled it off, cut it up and ate it with your rice. We had a cake for Joseph`s birthday and MC Donald`s for breakfast during VBS. I ate sparingly of that, but it was actually very balanced and not bad for you. Dude, it's eggs and toast and coffee. Oh, the coffee. I drank so much coffee, I had trouble sleeping at night, even though I was exhausted. 

At one dinner, Esther took our Up and Away, Sing and Play, Fly Away Finale group out for a king's dinner. This was a twenty-four course meal that basically only king's ate, way back in the day. I have pictures, but they're not too terrific, so just be patient. 

 You can see all the dishes.


  and also Keith's hand.

And at the end of VBS, the church took us all out to dinner, teachers, cast, crew, pastors, etc... to say thank you! We went to another seafood place, run by a member of the church, where I had simply the best crab I have ever tasted in my life. Tender, sweet, and ocean-fresh, we licked our fingertips as the kitchen staff explained patiently that, yes, you certainly can eat the shell. And why not?

There is a reason the Koreans use metal chopsticks. I was told, a long time ago, that the chopsticks were silver and thus when placed in poisoned food, they would instantly tarnish and show the delectables to be deadly. Since then, I have realized that the correct reason is because  Korean style eating is very communal. Everybody eats from the same dish, and no one worries about contamination or backwash. I have wandered into a singing rehearsal with my bottled water and the tenor and the soprano both said, "Oh! May I have some?" I naively assumed they meant for me to go retrieve them another bottle each, but the tenor simply relieved me of the bottle in my possession, drank from it and passed it to the soprano. Ah. I see. The communal nature of Korean food-sharing was brought home to me at the amusement park where Penny bought me a funnel cake and thereby earned my friendship for as long as we both shall live. Possessed of my fried goodness, I tried to share it with her and Taeyoung, both of whom politely excused themselves saying, "Later." I worried that I would have to eat the whole thing myself, a feat I normally could accomplish without batting an eyelid, but this day my tummy had begun its end-of-trip revolt. I wandered around for another three minutes worrying that I would have to throw the remainder away. I should have known. No sooner did we run into Sleki and another girl, did they pounce on the funnel cake and begin to devour it. Then Penny jumped in to get her fair share and I was left with the cardboard skeleton of an american classic. So the reason those chopsticks are made of metal? To fend your friends off of your food.