Food

A fringe benefit of my Korean lessons is that I now know my way around the staples of a Korean restaurant menu, which means I can be much more adventurous with what I order. In particular, there's a chain of restaurants called Kimbab Cheonguk (or Kimbab (or seaweed-rice) Heaven), the menu of which me and Christa had to memorise in entirety for homework recently. We've developed a semi-regular habit of popping in there after class to grab something to eat. Our previous method of finding new dishes was to pick at random and hope for the best. With hindsight, I see that we were rather lucky to avoid the fish egg noodles, the pig's intestine sausages, and the ox bone and snail "hangover" soup. In fact, it's my current favourite place to eat, as the aforementioned delicacies aside (which we haven't (yet?) tried so shouldn't judge) , they do have some great food on offer. Especially on cold days like these, there's nothing better than a hearty bowl of stew or soup, which the Koreans do very well. Doenjang jjigae, and its extra-pungent cousin Cheonggukjang jjigae, is a soybean paste-based soup, containing vegetables and tofu, and sometimes shellfish including small mussels and shrimp. I guess I have to accept that there's really no way for me to make fermented soybean paste sound appetizing, but it really is delicious. I'm faced with a similar problem when it comes to Budae jjigae, (which translates to "army base stew" since it was first created from surplus rations from the US Army after the Korean War). This is an excellent sinus-clearer, as being based on a chili/soybean paste it is very spicy. Common ingredients include instant noodes, tofu, beans, hot dogs and Spam! Trust me, it's great. I'm not aiming to turn this page into a recipe book, so I'll hold back for now on many of my other favourites. Suffice to say that I am a total convert to Korean food. There's really nothing from back home that I'm missing right now, but I know I'll be craving some of the food here when I'm gone. There are those (I'm thinking of Emma in particular but she's certainly not the only one) who have never really appreciated the food here; the only reason I can suggest is that opinions have been too heavily based on cafeteria food - contrast cafeteria with real food back home and you'll see the problem. But, I shouldn't speak for anyone else. I love Korean food. Let's leave it at that.