Cooking Korean

I recently decided that after nine months of living in Korea, I had better start learning how to cook some of the local food.  There's only so many times you can have pork with ginger and soy sauce before it starts to get old, and since Koreans seem able to cook a wide variety of dishes with what's available at the market, I thought I'd give some of those dishes a shot.

I found a helpful website (which I urge those of you playing at home to try out as well - www.mykoreankitchen.com) with a ton of Korean recipes written for the foreigner in mind (they're all in English).

For my first forays into the wide world of Korean food, I tried to recreate some of our favorite dishes from school (where Devon and I are lucky enough to be served lunch every day).  I figured this was a smart bet for two reasons: one, we could be fairly confident we'd like whatever it was I was making (no surprises like squid or silkworm pupae) and (I think more importantly), we'd have an benchmark to see how close my attempts came to "authentic" (aka. ECC cafeteria) Korean cooking.

I selected two meals: a spicy chicken and potato stew and bulgogi perhaps Korea's most famous dish.

Last night, I made the chicken stew, and for the most part it was good.  I added an extra cup of water to the recipe because the stew looked too thick while it was cooking, which wasn't such a good idea--turns out I don't know more than a Korean when it comes to Korean cooking.  It came out thin, and though it was flavorful, the flavors weren't as strong as they should be.

At school it comes in a thick, heavy sauce that's amazing on rice.  The blistering red-pepper paste contrasts beautifully with the caramelized sugars to create a dish that is both runny-nose spicy and dessert sweet.  This is perhaps the least "Korean" of the food we eat at school, though it may be because it's a chicken dish (most Korean food seems to have pork, beef, or the oceanic bounty in it).

For dinner tonight, I tried my hand at the bulgogi, sort of a stir-fried marinated beef dish.  The marinade took longer than I had anticipated to prepare, because of all the chopping and grating, though maybe it was just because I was unprepared.  Hopefully next time it'll go smoother as I work the kinks out.

Both dishes were easy enough to prepare though the chopping took long enough.  Once everything was ready though, they were incredibly easy to cook 5-minutes in a wok for one, an hour over a low flame for the other.

If any of you at home want to try either of these out, I'd recommend the bulgogi.  It isn't as spicy as the chicken dish and most of the ingredients should be readily available.  If not at the supermarket than at the local Asian market.

If you decide to make it, just follow the recipe for the marinade and dipping sauce.  To eat, just wrap it in lettuce and enjoy (the recipe calls for rice paper and perilla leaves, which are good, but unnecessary for enjoyment).  Serve hot and enjoy!

  Just don't forget the rice...

Engagement Special

Mom, Alysse, Megan, Kalli? Remember how you joked with me before I came to Korea? How you said I'd come back with a wife and a kid?

Well, stop laughing. It's not as funny when it's true.

In my defense though, I was tricked. Turns out you can't trust a seven-year old Korean girl, no matter how innocent she may appear.

I suppose I should explain myself a bit before wedding plans get made. Last Friday our school had a big celebration for the preschoolers who graduated to elementary school. After the graduation ceremony was a "variety show" featuring groups of preschoolers in ridiculous outfits dancing suggestively to selections from the canon of Korean and American pop while foreign teachers danced competently behind them.

Sprinkled between the dance routines were short skits starring both preschoolers and the foreign teachers.

My skit was about helping foreigners. I was told to go onstage, recite a few lines, then repeat what Lily, my 7-year old costar said to me. Easy enough.

The skit opened at an airport. Exhausted from a long flight and alone in a country I knew next to nothing about, I met Lily at the gate, a friendly Korean girl who offered to help me learn the ropes. "I'm so glad to meet someone who speaks English! This is my first time in Korea, and I don't know anything! Can you help me?" She said something in Korean to the audience and agreed.

After a lengthy bout of Korean speaking, she asked me if there was any Korean I wanted to know. Whatever you just said, I thought, but decided to let it wait. "Greetings," I answered. "I want to know greetings."

"When you greet someone in Korean, you say 'Sarang-heyo!'" she said as she hugged me.

Weird. On the plane, I had read in my Korean culture book that 'sarang-heyo' meant 'I love you.' And I certainly wasn't sure I was supposed to hug everyone immediately after meeting them. But then again, I'd also read that Koreans are a very friendly and welcoming people. And anyways, when an adorable girl hugs you, you hug back. "Sarang-heyo!" I said dutifully, as the parents chuckled quietly.

Later, we went to a restaurant and ate some sort of delicious rice dish while Lily said something to the parents. The food was so good I asked Lily how to say "It's delicious" in Korean.

"Nah-wah kyeol-hone hey-jwoh" she answered, down on one knee with her hands raised, palms up.

I paused. This whole knee thing was strange, I thought. But what did I know? I was a newcomer to a strange and foreign land. Their customs were different from ours. If they got down on one knee to praise the deliciousness of the food, who was I to judge? Maybe it was some sort of legacy from the poverty following the Korean War, kind of like thanking your host for preparing such a delicious, life-sustaining meal.

I could feel the parents watching me. How would I react to this strange new custom? Would I refuse to partake? Would I mess it up? I decided it was better to just follow Lily's example. I got down on my knee and raised my hands, palms up like she showed me.

"Nah-wah kyeol-hone hey-jwoh!" I said as loudly as I could, beaming at Lily proudly. 

I'd done it, my first cross-cultural learning experience! I had eaten a strange and delicious food, and complimented the chef in her native tongue! Maybe this whole cultural assimilation thing wasn't so hard after all! The audience cheered wildly.

In a flash, it was over. While I was congratulating myself for having successfully navigated a small part of Korean culture, Lily was snapping a pair of pink fuzzy handcuffs around my wrist. Before I could even grab my suitcase, Lily dragged me off stage left to the sound of the parents hooting and hollering.

"What was with the handcuffs?" I asked Monica, one of the Korean teachers backstage.

"Do you know what you just said?" she asked, laughing. "You asked her to marry you." 

I'd been duped!

Instead of being about how to help foreigners, the skit was about how to trick them into marrying you! It all made sense now. The too-friendly girl at the airport looking for the first foreigner to step off the plane looking completely and utterly lost. The knowing smiles and laughs from the audience as I greeted her. It was all just an elaborate guise to trick a foreigner and find a husband! And I fell right into her devious little trap!

I'm going to see what I can do to work this out over here. Devon's not too happy about my engagement to a seven-year old student, and I'm already feeling intense pressure to impress Lily's parents.

But if I can't figure this out and break the engagement, Mom and Dad, you might be getting some angry phone calls from a couple of Korean parents wondering where their future son-in-law is. If that happens, just pretend to not speak English and hang up. Go for some random language that nobody speaks, like Korean. That should fool them.