Seaweed, rice cakes, Christine, Paterson . . .

delicious rice cakes

Korean persimmon tea is simmering on the stove as I type and the whole house smells like cinnamon and ginger. Very cozy and autumnal.

Korean dishes cooked this week:

*Sauteed tofu. From Robin Ha’s Cook Korean! Sauté tofu, top with a sauce of soy and sesame oil. Nice. Bland. Simple. Little else to say. Recipe here.

*Seaweed salad, also from Cook Korean! You rehydrate dried seaweed, mix with julienned cucumber and carrot, dress with a sugary, vinegary dressing, and eat. Or don’t eat. This recipe does not yield the dainty, finely shredded seaweed salad you’ll find at sushi restaurants, but a salad with biggish, dark, slippery leaves. (Though obviously you could go ahead and shred the seaweed.) I liked it. Mark: “It doesn’t look good, it doesn’t taste good. I think I might have fatigue from challenging meals.” 

*Spicy rice cakes. I’ve tried two recipes for Korean spicy rice cakes now, Maangchi’s and Robin Ha’s. They look almost identical, but Maangchi’s recipe is more precise and better.* The dish consists of wonderfully chewy cylindrical rice cakes cooked in a light, easy fish broth and spiced exuberantly with red pepper flakes and gochujang. Traditionally, it calls for fish cake but I have learned that I don’t like Korean fish cake, which is flat, with the texture of fabric. So for my second try at spicy rice cakes I omitted the fish cake and fried a half pound ground pork, salted it, and folded it in to the rice cakes at the end. Ravishing. Those are the changes I made to the recipe here. (Although Maangchi says otherwise in her headnote, you could use chicken stock if you are not prepared to track down dried anchovies and kelp. However, keep in mind that both ingredients are readily available at Asian markets and the broth could not be easier to make.)

*Butter dumplings from Koreatown by Deuki Hong and Matt Rodbard. So outlandish I had to try this recipe which you’ll find along with a little backstory here. This is basically the standard formula for Chinese and Korean dumplings except that in addition to ground pork, cabbage, ginger, and garlic, it calls for a pound of butter. 

You read that right, friends. A pound of butter. Hardcore.

You knead that pound of softened butter into the meat the best you can and stuff your dumplings. Some of the butter leaked out in the cooking, but there was plenty left inside the dumplings and you could see it and taste it. I watched the butter run down Owen’s chin after he bit into a dumpling and there was congealed butter on the plates when I went to put them in the dishwasher. Yes, it freaked me out. The dumplings were buttery and delicious, but not delicious enough to outweigh my qualms. Fun. Never again.

I have to take a short break from cooking Korean food this coming week, given that both Mark and Owen are rebelling. But I’ll be back to it soon. 

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On another subject, I’ve seen lots of great movies in the last few weeks, thanks in part to the Mill Valley Film Festival. A couple of these haven’t opened yet, but here are my recommendations, both whole-hearted and qualified: 

American Honey, directed by Andrea Arnold, got under my in in big way.  It’s about a crew of kids who drive around the country selling magazines, drinking mezcal, falling in love, getting in trucks and convertibles with strangers, dumpster diving, and other good stuff. It’s long and meandering and I can see all its flaws but I could have sat there all day watching the story, such as it is, unfold, and listening to the music. It was like being inside a strange yet mysteriously familiar dream.

Christine, about a Florida newscaster who shot herself on air in 1974 just before her thirtieth birthday, was like being inside a strange yet grimly familiar nightmare. The nightmare of those rancid moments/days/weeks in your life when you couldn’t seem to do anything right, when you were at war with yourself and your mother and the world and increasingly sure that nothing good — not professional success, not love, not peace of mind — was in your future. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, count your blessings!) The film featured an incredible lead performance by Rebecca Hall and was the most deeply unpleasant good movie I’ve seen in recent weeks with the possible exception of A Quiet Passion. 

You probably know that Emily Dickinson had a hard life but if you didn’t A Quiet Passion will fill you in on all the sad details, from the romantic frustrations to the seizures. (It also shows the rapturous joy Dickinson took in her work, which she did in the wee hours of the morning, by candlelight, before the rest of her family got out of bed.) Like Christine, it features a powerful performance from a lead actress, in this case Cynthia Nixon. Like Christine is its wrenching to watch. If you have a robust appetite for harrowing movies, see both of these films. If you have a limited appetite, just see Quiet Passion. If you have no appetite skip these two and go see Paterson, about a sweet-natured New Jersey poet/bus driver who finds grace in everyday life. Paterson, set in Paterson, New Jersey, is lovely, offbeat, and droll. Fans of Adam Driver will want to see this for sure, as will fans of William Carlos Williams.

Another lovely movie: California Typewriter, a documentary about a typewriter shop in Berkeley, California and the universe of typewriter enthusiasts, which includes Tom Hanks and Sam Shepard and a lot of delightful weirdos. I dragged Owen to this one and I was pretty sure I was going to have to do something nice to make it up to him afterwards, but we both loved it. We both want a typewriter now.

Everyone I know who’s seen Certain Women thought it was boring but, as with American Honey, I wouldn’t have minded if this film, which stars Laura Dern and Michelle Williams, had lasted all day. It tells the stories of three women dealing with crushes, careers, and construction projects in wintry Montana and I concede, it was kind of boring. For me, it was the right kind of boring. 

Not at all boring: Moonlight. As all the reviews have argued, this movie about a sensitive black kid growing up in the projects, is brilliant. If you think you might have trouble getting inside the head and tender heart of a silent, muscle-bound drug dealer with gold grillz and a do-rag, you haven’t seen Moonlight. You should. The Terry Gross interview with the writer and director was fascinating.

YUM

"I'm not going to be nice to you until you stop cooking Korean food"

those noodles

Fifteen minutes ago, as I was finishing this post, Owen wandered by and asked what we were having for dinner. When I said “spicy Korean rice cakes,” he kindly shared his thoughts on Korean food with me. Verbatim: 

“Seriously when are you going to stop making Korean food? I just want to know when you’re going to be done with this stupid project. Fine! I just won’t eat dinner. I hate having Korean food EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. I don’t know why you don’t get bored by it especially because you’re the one cooking it. Can you make good food for once? You never do, except for that one thing, those noodles, and the dumplings were pretty good too. Maybe I’ll just hide all your Korean cookbooks. Tomorrow you won’t be able to find your Korean cookbooks.” 

making a costume and trashing his sister's bedroom

Here are my thoughts on Korean cooking and cookbooks:

-On Saturday, I made the easy seaweed soup from Robin Ha’s Cook Korean! with plans to eat it on Sunday for lunch. On Sunday at lunchtime I took the pot out of the fridge, opened the lid, gazed down at the shiny seaweed undulating gently in murky liquid, and decided I wasn’t hungry for lunch after all. I put it back in the fridge. At dinner time, I took the pot out again, steeled myself, heated it up, and served the soup with rice. To my surprise, no one complained, not even Owen. Once you get past the fact that it looks like seawater, seaweed soup is tasty. Brothy and full of beef and slippery, yummy, slightly disconcerting seaweed. This isn’t the recipe I used, but it’s similar. 

-Korean cuisine abounds in porridges, sweet and savory. I haven’t made any Korean porridge yet, but have my eye on the pine nut porridge, sesame porridge, and, above all, the sweet pumpkin porridge. This is the perfect season to make sweet pumpkin porridge and I even have a pumpkin sitting on the counter for just this purpose. I think I’ve been putting off making sweet pumpkin porridge because once I taste it I will no longer be able to imagine what sweet pumpkin porridge tastes like. I imagine it will taste like the rich, mellow essence of autumn. It can’t possibly be that good.

-Korean cuisine also abounds in pancakes — seafood, scallion, chili pepper, zucchini, pollock, sweet. So far I’ve only tried the ultra-easy kimchi pancake from Cook Korean! Mark and I liked it a lot. I thought Owen liked it too but he says no. Owen: “I only ate it because I was really really hungry and hadn’t eaten anything the whole day.” To make this pancake, you chop 1 1/2 cups kimchi, mix with 1 cup flour, 1 cup water, 1/3 cup kimchi brine, and 1/4 cup ground pork. Dollop into a hot, oiled skillet, spreading into a pancake shape. Fry until crisp on the bottom, about 5 minutes. Flip. Fry another minute to crisp on the other side.  Salt lightly. Cut with a pizza cutter into wedges. Serve with a dipping sauce of your choice — or no dipping sauce at all. Robin Ha notes that you can replace the pork with any meat you like, including canned tuna. In future I would choose something with more flavor than plain ground pork. 

-In my books I have several recipes for a sweet Korean rice cake that you steam on a bed of pine needles. 

-As I mentioned in a previous post, I made Maangchi’s japchae (glass noodles with vegetables and meat) a few weeks ago and it was superb. I made the japchae from Cook Korean! last week and it was only ok. The ingredients are almost exactly the same, so what was the difference? Maangchi calls for three times the sugar, double the sesame oil, and almost double the soy sauce. She also calls for 3 dried shiitake mushrooms in addition to fresh. In other words: dried mushroom umami + extra sugar + extra fat + extra sodium = better japchae. Quelle surprise.

-Rice cake soup (tteokguk), is a lovely dish that, according to Robin Ha, Koreans eat on New Year’s Day for the same reasons we eat hoppin’ john.  Ha: “The clean white color of the soup signals a fresh new start and the coin shape of the rice cakes is believed to bring good fortune and good luck.” You cook some beef in water to make a stock, then add rice cakes which become meltingly tender as they simmer. They also throw off enough starch to turn the broth thick and white. Friday night I felt sick and was deciding whether to skip dinner or heat up the leftover rice cake soup. I heated up the rice cake soup and my stamina was completely and instantly restored.

Stamina. That’s one of the many words it will be hard to use with a straight face after this election. I realized as I was writing this post that I’m no longer comfortable ending a paragraph with a short exclamatory comment because I sound like a Donald Trump tweet. Sad!

And what I just did (sad!) is already a cliche. 

On another subject, I reviewed the first-ever biography of the great Betty MacDonald, a book I’ve been waiting years for someone to write. You can read my review here. 

Molly Yeh and Jessica Koslow: First Impressions

It is always a good idea to share your first impressions of cookbooks so you’re on record with opinions you will later need to take back, like how a few years ago I announced how much I hated Gabrielle Hamilton’s Prune only to realize shortly thereafter that it was a masterwork, one of the great, spiky, original cookbooks of all time. 

A couple of hot new cookbooks arrived the other night and here are my thoughts after spending an hour or so looking through them. 

Molly on the Range by Molly Yeh

In case you do not know already, Molly Yeh is a gorgeous, exuberant, and very young food blogger who once studied percussion at Juilliard and now lives with her adorable husband on his family farm in North Dakota where she bakes a lot of really tall, really cute, cakes. She is immensely popular. Popular as in 172,000 Instagram followers. She doesn’t use capital letters, she’s always smiling, and everything she photographs looks dreamy.

That sounds insufferable, but somehow isn’t. She’s just too bubbly and happy to be insufferable.

Yeh’s first book is, at first glance, charming. I have not read all the stories about her life and I’m not sure I will, but I love the look of these recipes. Yeh likes to pile a lot of delicious things into a dish. You could call these “embarrassment of riches” recipes. Walnut crusted brie mac and cheese with apples and pancetta. Dark chocolate marzipan scone loaf. Scallion pancake challah. Butter and salami pizza. Tahini blondie ice cream sandwiches. What could be better than a steamed Chinese bun? A steamed Chinese bun folded around crispy schnitzel. What could be better than that? A steamed Chinese bun folded around crispy schnitzel with Sriracha mayonnaise.

I’m not Molly Yeh’s perfect reader. I’m too old. Will I soon find myself smiling indulgently and patiently and mailing this book to Isabel?

Only time will tell. 

Everything I Want to Eat by Jessica Koslow (a.k.a. the Sqirl cookbook)

Jessica Koslow is not quite as young as Molly Yeh, but she’s pretty darn young. She owns the exquisite little Los Angeles restaurant Sqirl where I once ate a very nice breakfast, some kind of crunchy savory rice dish the details of which are vague but the overall wholesome goodness of which remains vivid. Her book is harder to warm to than Yeh’s, more serious, edgy, modern arty. I find the design a bit off-putting, the unsmiling faces of striking or semi-famous people who stare out from the photographs disconcerting, like I just arrived at a party where everyone is cooler than I am.

I’ll get over that.

Where Yeh tries to pack as many crowd-pleasing ingredients into a single dish as she can, Koslow is more apt to pair the pleasant with the not-so-pleasant. Koslow will often emphasize something slightly “scary” about a dish, be that a color or an ingredient, something that will turn some people off (like my husband), but excite and challenge others. Beet-cured salmon. Kohlrabi tzatziki. Stinging nettle cavatelli. Black cod ceviche with purple yam. Carrot ginger black sesame loaf. Just the colors in the names of those last two dishes would make Mark anxious.

I don’t want to overstate this tendency. You might not even notice it if you hadn’t just been romping around in the marzipan fairyland of Molly on the Range.

Based on my lukewarm first impression, I will probably end up cherishing Koslow’s book. The cookbooks (and people) I end up loving the most are the ones I have trouble with at first.

***

And in Korean cooking news, japchae, the classic slippery dish of sweet potato noodles with meat and vegetables was a giant hit. Owen went crazy for it and asked me to make it again and so I shall. Leftovers reheated beautifully in a skillet. I used Maangchi’s recipe from her book, but the version on the blog is not all that different. Just double it. I skipped the egg. Highly recommend.

A birthday, Spam burritos, acorn jelly, and other good stuff

Even I can't mess up a picture of THAT.

What happened to the Korean food, you ask?

In reverse chronological order, here’s what I’ve been up to for the last few weeks. Some food in there, not that much. 

Owen turned 16 a couple days ago. He did not want bulgogi or japchae so we went out for pizza. Gifts he received: the Everybody Wants Some! soundtrack, a vintage Dolly Parton album, a venus flytrap, The Wide Sargasso Sea, a notebook, an amazon gift card, The Dude and the Zen Master, and an Indonesia guidebook.

That somewhat reflects the range of Owen’s enthusiasms -- and in the case of a couple of those gifts, what his parents hope will become his enthusiasms. 

At 16, Owen has a lot of fine qualities, but above all, he is a creature of passionate enthusiasms. The enthusiasms constantly rotate, but currently include ABBA, comic books, cosplay, Goats of Anarchy, his plants, Kenny Rogers, our cats, building sets for school theater productions, The Big Lebowski, cereal, and computer games. When Owen loves something he loves it ardently and learns everything about it. In the car the other day I was treated to a long, almost scholarly lecture about the artistry of ABBA, including meditations on the voices of Frida and Agnetha  (Owen prefers Frida’s voice which is more “majestic”), the way the group’s sunny early albums gave way to darker works culminating in their brooding masterpiece The Visitors and a sadly unreleased final album. The disquisition lasted 25 minutes and I enjoyed every minute of it, although I think it’s time he choose a new band as he appears to have sucked ABBA dry. Plus, his father can barely stand to hear the word “ABBA” let alone their music and would be pleased if Owen moved on to something he can relate to, like Led Zeppelin.

I think Dolly Parton is a better bet, a shorter leap.

It’s a surprisingly rare gift, the capacity for great enthusiasm. But it is not a gift that people automatically envy or admire or even recognize as a gift. Brains, athleticism, charisma, beauty -- they all seem so much more important when you’re a kid. In the long run, though, I would argue that a capacity for enthusiasm is every bit as valuable, maybe more. Life is richer when you can really get into things. There’s always something coming around the corner to absorb you, to  keep the world sparkling. It’s how I get by, anyway.

If it sounds like I just suggested that Owen is enthusiastic but otherwise a loser, that is not what I meant at all! He has a lot of abilities, I just meant that to his mother, in 2016, it is his gift for enthusiasm that seems most likely to stand him in good stead throughout his hopefully long and happy life.

Moving on. What happened before the birthday?

Oh right, this.

The frozen pizza was lousy and Donald Trump was worse, but Hillary killed it and that was all that mattered.

I have nothing original to say about the election so I’ll say nothing, although like everyone I know I’m obsessed and can not wait for it to be over.

vintage photo of a woman making fry bread  

Before the debate, I was on a reporting trip for a magazine and my father came along for the ride. For five days we drove around the American Southwest talking, eating, staying in some wonderfully bad old motels and looking at 12th-century Puebloan cliff dwellings. It was a beautiful experience, but I will be writing about it elsewhere so should keep my powder dry, as they say. 

Some culinary highlights: I ordered Navajo tacos everywhere I went. Hot fry bread topped with meat (ground beef, chicken, pulled pork), beans, shredded cheese, lettuce and anything else the cook wants to throw on there. My father cringes at the word “fry” and refused to even taste a Navajo taco, preferring to stick with regional specialties like the turkey wrap and soup of the day. It was sad that he didn’t get to experience the pleasure of a Navajo taco and it is also sad that I will probably be dead before I reach his age.

But wait! I did get him to try a roast mutton taco. By the side of the road in Shiprock, New Mexico  a bunch of people had set up little tents with portable stoves and were advertising tacos filled with pork chop or roast mutton.  I said, “Let’s split one.” My father said, “Please just do me a favor, no mutton. And a regular tortilla, not fry bread.”

Obviously, I could not honor that request. We watched the woman at the stand of our choice stretch a ball of pale dough into a disc, drop it into bubbling oil, pluck it out with tongs a minute later, wrap this hot, golden bread around some strips of dark, super-tough, savory mutton and slather it all with fresh green chile sauce. I took one bite of this delicious thing, handed it to my father, and the next time I looked over he had finished it.

mutton = warm, gamy jerky

I thought I’d finally loosened his corset, but no. The next morning we stopped at a gas station and noticed a line of cars idling, hand-written menus affixed to the windows. They were selling Navajo breakfast burritos. To my father’s horror, I bought a Spam burrito, a steaming bundle of

mashed potatoes and crumbled ham wrapped in flour tortilla. I know how disagreeable that sounds if you think you hate Spam, as I used to, but it was very satisfying.  My father declined to even taste it. I guess some of you are probably with him on this one. Wimps.

My dad ate the serrano pepper.

And now we have finally traveled back far enough in time to get to some Korean food that I served before the trip to the Southwest.

If you grew up in California hearing about how the native people subsisted on acorn mush, you may understand the allure of acorn powder. 

The most interesting dish I made was the acorn jelly salad from Robin Ha’s  Cook Korean! You mix acorn powder with water, pour into a brownie pan, and chill until it sets into a firm jelly that has a mild, earthy flavor. You slice up this jelly and add it to a salad of cucumbers, lettuce, and lovely soy sauce dressing. I told Owen the strips of acorn jelly were noodles and tried to think of them as noodles myself, because what are noodles but starch and liquid?

That is no noodle.

But it didn’t quite work, the noodle trick. Acorn jelly isn’t exactly an acquired taste, it’s more of an acquired texture — cold, damp, slippery and strange to a Western palate. It wasn’t bad, but I will have to nurture my appreciation of acorn jelly.

I also made some superb spicy ribs from Koreatown, the appreciation of which required no nurturing, and a very enjoyable kimchi fried rice from Cook Korean!

Before that. . . well, I think I’m all caught up.  Sorry for the long absence. 

One of our cats liked the Korean ribs as much as we did.