음식, 추석, 그리고 여행 (Food, Chuseok, and trips)

Hey!
So,  next s been a while since I've blogged, and I've missed writing, so, hello!
Since my last post so many things have happened, and I've realized that while it's annoying for me to try to catch you all up on my doings, it's probably actually annoying for you too! So, I'm not even gonna try. I will just tell you that I had a great summer camp with my students last month (We did Pirate theme) and I'll post a few pictures so you can see the stuff we made. (Not in this post though...it has enough pictures)
I went to Busan and visited Eunju, and we went to a baseball game at the Busan stadium (which I've heard is one of the advised activities for tourists in Korea)
Sunday I went to Seoul with my church friend, Stella and met up with her sister, Cathy, and went to Studio Ghibli's first exhibition of artwork outside of Japan. The exhibition consisted of the original drawings, sketches, and frames for the movies. It was really amazing (if you are an anime fan) and the drawings were so detailed and complicated, but still seemed simple somehow. It was amazing.
Unfortunately there were about a million other people there and since all the art pieces were small drawings, it was a rather ridiculous process trying to see things and appreciate them for any length of time. People would crowd up to the drawings and everyone pretty much moved in a huge, packed, sweaty line down the walls...ugh. Anyway, it was fun and we had a great day together.

This is the art center, and the top of it is shaped like Choseon dynasty hat. Very cute. Sorry for the bad picture, we were driving away when I realized I wanted a picture of it. 

 Follow the soot sprites to the exhibition!

We got our tickets! Yay! Excited! 

 While we waited, we took pictures with Totoro!

And found his little helpers....

And ran into no face....

Big wall sized sketch of Ponyo on the way in...

Since we weren't allowed to take pictures of the actual exhibition work (for obvious reasons) I don't have any pictures of it. But, they had this brilliant idea to let the fans do their own art and so at the end of the exhibition they had a white walled room (featured on the left) and provided blank stickers and black markers for the fans to draw their own anime characters and fill the walls with them. And the walls WERE filled. All those walls you see in the left pictures are covered in layers of these little stickers. I took some pictures of my favorite drawings....Turnip head from Howls Moving Castle

Totoro...

Howl...

 A bunch of stickers...lol

 And a contribution by yours truly (the fire with the face) Calcifer from Howls Moving Castle.

 And on the way out, a huge poster from Princess Mononoke. 

So, after all the excitement, we decided we were hungry and went to a delicious burger place recommended by Cathy's husband...good choice. I will definitely be going back. 

Here we are...waiting for our food! We were so hungry!

Here they are! Huge, delicious, and worth the wait (and the price! only about $13 for one of these...pretty inexpensive for Seoul)

So, after all that, I thought you all might like to see/ know about some Korean food. I've been having "Cooking lessons" every other Thursday, and so have sort of learned how to make some Korean food during my time here. Also, since 추석 is this Thursday (The Korean equivalent of Thanksgiving...two day work week! yes!!!) I thought I would discuss some of the traditional Chuseok food as well. (I will have to research that to tell you about it, so it's a good learning chance for me as well. :)

So, firstly there is Kimbap. I've heard people say its "the Korean version of sushi". I don't think that's a good way to describe it, since, to me at least, "sushi" implies "raw fish" or just "fish rolled up in seaweed"
Well, Kimbap is rolled up in seaweed, but I've never had raw fish in one. The most common type of Kimbap is ham, egg, pickled radish, pickled barrowroot (<--- no idea what that is...sorry. I just know that's what it translates to from Korean) and cucumber. All of that is rolled up in seaweed with rice
spread on it. So good!
Here are pictures of the Kimbap and Omurice(<----- literally just rice with veggies and some meat, wrapped up in eggs. So, it's an "omlette with rice" hence the them "Omurice".) that I made during my first cooking lesson.

This is the kimbap ingredients:

Here I am mixing the rice with sesame oil, and rolling it up

Now I'm making the Omurice.....and eating it! Yay! Delicious.

The next thing I learned how to make is Bulgogi and Kimchi-jjigea (Meat and Soup). Bulgogi is the type of meat cut I think because you can get pork and beef bulgogi and there are difference sauces for different flavors and stuff. I personally like beef bulgogi better, but its ridiculously expensive, so I always eat pork bulgogi. 

So, here is pork bulgogi steps 1,2 and 3:

Ingredients: Carrot, cabbage, mushrooms, onion, garlic and bulgogi sauce

Throw it all together with the meat and pour the sauce over it (not the whole bottle). Let it sit for 15-20 mins, then just start letting it simmer. Takes about 25 mins on a medium heat. 

So here is the Kimchi-jjigea:
Ingredients: Kimchi, tofu, onion, water and a think a bit of soy sauce to temper out the flavor.

 All done, ready to eat! We ate the bulgogi wrapped up in lettuce and with a dab of that red sauce you can see. So good! But you can eat bulgogi by itself if you want.

So the next thing I made was Dalkbokumbap and Japche (Spicy chicken stew(Dalkbokumbap) and rice noodles with veggies (Japche)). Pretty good, except for the bones in the chicken. I really hate eating meat on the bone, especially in a soup or stew.(and with chopsticks its a challenge not to drop it back in your soup and splash yourself...I've done that many times at school and looked like a messy idiot.)

 Yum yum yum. I actually really like Japche, I should eat it more often. I don't know why I never go get it. It's in almost all the Kimbap places. Oh, there's something that's interesting. So, there are all these little restaurants that we call "Kimbap places". Most of them literally just have the word "Kimbap" on the sign, marking it as a kimbap place. Kimbap places are all basically the same. They have the same menu, with perhaps small variations in the way things are made, or a few dishes that perhaps are different from the place down the street. But they are all basically the same. You can get, obviously, kimbap there, ramyun (ramen), mandu (like chinese dumplings) donketsu (fried pork cutlet), dokkbokki (spice rice cakes...bleh!) japche, and other dishes. The list is pretty long. But they are ALL the same. And they are EVERYwhere! And many of them are 24 hour! The street in front of my apartment has two or three kimbap places spread out by just a few other stores in between. There are at least 8 or 9 kimbap places around  the University area (the place where I live) and there are probably billions of them in Korea itself. I really don't know how to describe it. It's not a chain, because each place is individually owned, they just all have the same menu. So, anyway, yes, another quirk about Korea.

Okay, back to food. So I also learned how to make Jangdorim and Jawn ( shredded pork with quail eggs in soy sauce and Korean pancakes)
We eat Jangdorim sometimes at school for lunch, and its delicious. It's pretty easy to make, but a bit more work than some of the other dishes. Since the cut of pork used for this dish is pretty strong smelling, you have to boil it with garlic and ginger root for 30 mins before separating it and simmering it with the eggs. The eggs also have to be hardboiled and peeled and soaked in the sauce a bit before adding the meat (I think...I kind of forgot how to make this. I need another cooking lesson on this one.)
Jawn (thats just how its pronounced, not how it is romanized) are Korean pancakes, but they are salty, not sweet. As you can see in the pictures, one of the ingredients is...quite...salty....

Jawn ingredients.

 The salty ingredient...yes, fresh squid...and yes...I sliced that up myself. Very rubbery.

Jangdorim ingredients.

cooking away....

Finished! Korean pancakes are traditionally accompanied by Makkoli, Korean rice wine. Makkoli can be very...um...pungent tasting, so I like to mix it with something a little sweet so as to tone down the flavor. Which is what that can of sweet makkoli is. what goes better with makkoli than more makkoli? And don't be fooled by the "wine" part of "rice wine". It tastes nothing like wine. Not even close. 

 And the last thing I have learned to make in my cooking classes is another type of bulgogi and this bean soup. I don't remember the Korean name. I wanted to learn how to make beef bulgogi, so I went with my cooking teacher to the store and bought all the ingredients and the meat, but when we got home and made it and were taste testing it, I realized she bought pork bulgogi and just used the beef bulgogi sauce....sigh...even though I said I wanted to get beef, she still got pork. Kind of disappointed. Oh well. Anyway, the bean soup was good, but man...the bean paste used to make it is almost as pungent as Kimchi and smells even worse. But it makes good soup, so that's good. I still have half a block of the paste in my fridge and I've got that baby in an airtight zip-lock that will never be opened until absolutely necessary.

 "Beef" bulgogi ingredients

Stinky beanpaste soup...

Cooking...

Done! 

So, that is what I have learned in my cooking class so far. It has been an enjoyable learning process, but since she just shows me, and doesn't really explain or write things down, I don't think I'll be able to remember how to make it in the future...I plan on remaking everything with her and this time writing down the ingredients and the steps. So we'll see how that goes. 

So, on to other foods. I also made bibimbap during the cultural learning part of a workshop I had to go to in Jeonju (a neighboring city) and that was fun. But I don't really like bibimbap that much. Its just rice, a bunch of veggies, an egg and gochujang (korean pepper sauce) all mixed up together. I don't really like gochujang, so I think that's why I don't like bibimbap that much. But, here is my beautiful creation. :) 

Cute right? Other foods that are popular and abundant in Korea, besides fast food places, are Samgyupsal (Korean BBQ) and sea food. We went to a mud festival in Boryeong (another neighboring city) and had these ridiculously fresh and big clams. Kudos to the two guys in our group that grilled these. 

There is also this dish called "Shabu Shabu". Sounds like some sort of gibberish incantation, I know. But it's actually really delicious. It's really thinly sliced beef that you put in boiling hot water for a minute or so and then wrap up in a spring roll with some veggies. It's really good. I had it in Busan with Eunju. 

These are all the shabu shabu ingredients. So good!!!

Another thing that is popular in Korea is porridge. I always think of like...Quaker oats or maltomeal when I think of the word "porridge". I think of nuts and cinnamon and milk. But in Korea, its not that way. They probably do have sweet porridge, but I've never seen or had it here. What I have had, is very salty, but good, cheesy porridge, or fishy porridge. And it's served in a gigantic bowl, because...hey, everyone is famished when they order porridge, right? 

That bowl is deep...very deep. They give you a ladle for it...and that's just for one person. It's not even the large sized bowl!!!

Oh, another thing that is very Korean is the street food. You can get a variety of foods from street vendors, but my favorite are the meat and rice cakes and fish cakes on a stick. So good! And so cheap! The hotdogs are also quite delicious because they are real meat. 

This a actually a pretty big street food vendor place. A lot of vendors don't have this variety...these are probably street vendors in Seoul...I got this off of google. Oh...wait...oh my gosh! I know that street vendor lady! LOL! Totally a coincidence, but this is actually the first street vendor I went to in Seoul! Featured below are Emilee and I eating food from this exact place! I forgot this place was famous...lol, guess that's why it's on google! Anyway, as you can see, there is a variety of dishes to choose from. The yellow things in the red sauce(not the farthest left, but second from the left) is dokkbokki and it is loved by Koreans. I personally don't like it...but I think that's just because I ate it once in China and got food poisoning and had to taste it again on its way out....

 This food is super delicious. We are eating dak (rice cake) wrapped in meat. Here is a close up: 

 so... good!

Some other street foods are: 

Fish cakes. Also can be in a soup which is delicious.

French fries stuck to corn dogs...really disgusting in my opinion. The outside is usually mouth burning hot and the hotdog is cold. Not cooked well. 

Every body's favorite side dish: Silk worms. These things are so disgusting but Koreans will eat them out of a cup with a spoon. Makes me want to vomit. The smell is also horrific....bleh...on the up side, it does help me to know which street vendor to avoid. 

And lastly, there is Patbingsoo, or just Bingsoo. This is a treat eaten in the summer time, and its basically just shaved ice with various different choices of toppings. Featured below is the standard red bean and sweet rice cake topping: Patbingsoo.

This was delicious. There was also crushed strawberry on top! Yummy!

Okay, so, maybe you are hungry by now, but I'm not quite finished with the food as I would like to tell you about Chuseok food. However, I am going to put that into a separate post and tell you more about Chuseok as a whole holiday, rather than just food. So, while this post has Chuseok in the title...there will be no Chuseok talk. 

However, I will leave you with a cute story for the day.

So, my kindergartners love Totoro. ( If you don't what Totoro is, scroll up to first couple of pictures in this post or click here for a picture: http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/File:Totoro.gif

 He's a cute sort of big fluffy tree spirit from one of Hiyao Miyazaiki's anime films.)
Anyway, I used to have this Totoro decoration for my phone that my kids loved, and they found out about Totoro that way. So, now they like to sing the Totoro song (just the "Totoro Totoro" part) and they always want to play with my little phone decoration. It broke a few months ago, and I got another one, but that one broke as well, so I haven't had any Totoro's around lately. My kids often ask where Totoro is, and instead of telling them he's broken, I just tell them he is at home (which is true because I didn't throw it out) so this conversation transpired last week with one of my kindergarten girls. (While the conversation happened in Korean, I will translate for you. :)

::Kindergarten Girl is coloring and I am sitting next to her looking at my phone::

Kindergartner: *taps me on the arm* "Is Totoro at home today?"

Me:"Yes, he's home. Do you miss Totoro?"

K:"Yeah...."

::Goes back to coloring for a few seconds.::

K: "What's Totoro's cellphone number?"

M: "Totoro doesn't have a cellphone."

K: *Sad  face* "Oh...really? Why?" 

So adorable, made me laugh. Luckily for her, she will see Totoro soon because they have earned a movie day, and I bet you can guess what movie we will watch. 

Well, that's all for today! It is Chuseok today, the Midautumnal festival in Asia and equivalent to America's Thanksgiving. I went to Stella's house and we had good food (unfortunately no Korean food because her parents were gone. But we made Italian food, drank wine and watched a few movies! It was a good day. :)
 Happy Chuseok everyone! See you next time! 

Have a wonderful day!

~TWGA

P.S. If you have read this post, would you mind leaving a comment "like" or "dislike" (if you didn't like it) in the comment box? It would really encourage me to write more often if I knew that people were actually reading my posts! Thanks guys!!