"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.