Day: September 3, 2011

[broken link! FIXME] It being Saturday, I got home from work relatively early.  I had been feeling motivated to go do some shopping, but when I stopped by the bank to get cash, I discovered that my ATM card had expired.  I guess that's one of those signs that I've been in Korea a long time.  I need to go by the bank and get a new card.

So, being low on cash, I did a minor grocery run in the GS Mart instead, and came home.

I had this big pile of apples that have been getting older. As in, beginning to get soft and brown-spotted. Obviously, I'm not eating them fast enough. Feeling some minor inspiration, I decided to make some curried apple-onion chutney.  It turned out to be one of those random, no-recipe-in-sight culinary experiments that was utterly successful. I try to keep wine around for cooking even though I don't drink much alcohol, and I had this intriguing bottle of Korean chardonnay (Korean!), called Mujuang (see picture).  I heated the chutney in that, with some lemon juice and lots of spices (tumeric, cumin, clove, cinnamon, red pepper flakes, etc. – a homemade curry powder), just long enough to make the apples and onions tender and to blend in the spices, and then I let it cool.

Then I took some of my already-cooked dark red beans that I keep in fridge (I have no idea what variety they are, in western parlance – they're just a kind of generic Korean dark red beans, which I cook in a large batch in my rice cooker and keep in a tupperware in the fridge) and I heated them up with a dash of sesame oil, with rosemary and garlic.  I scooped some rice out of my cooker into a little pilaf-thingy.  I always cook my rice with some 혼합곡 [honhapgok = "medley" (a fifteen-grain medley)] mixed in, about 2 parts rice to 1 part grain medley, to give it more texture and flavor, and that lends it a purplish color.

Here is a picture of my dinner.

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It was a creative and tasty meal – its flavors and textures reminded me a lot of the vegan, Indian-cuisine themed restaurant I used to frequent when I lived in Mexico City in the 1980's, which is still one of my favorite restaurants of all time.