Category: Food & Drink

Normally, on Thursdays Art and I go to town and do our weekly shopping and library visit, but because of how icy the road was, I decided not to. We also normally order a pre-made pizza at the place called “Papa’s Pizza” and take it home and so Thursday is “pizza night.” Yesterday, we had no pizza night. I got a bit creative, and made kimchi bokkeumbap (Korean style fried rice) – something I’ve been craving.

I’d tried the dish once before, a few years ago, for Arthur, to rather mixed reviews. So I altered the recipe some to his benefit: I doubled the amount of ham I used, I halved the amount of kimchi I added (compensating with some red pepper powder to keep it spicy), and I was generous with salt. I left out the dried seaweed garnish that is integral to the Korean version.

Arthur declared this new version entirely acceptable. Which is high praise, coming from Arthur. And I put my seaweed on the side and added it separately to my own serving. To be honest, I found the result to be remarkably close to my memories of the street-vendor version available on every corner in South Korea. It was very good.

Last week, Jan gave me a Daikon – which is a vegetable popular in China and Korea that resembles a radish.

On Thursday, I made some danmuji (단무지), which is a Korean-style pickled daikon that is a ubiquitous dish in Korean restaurants, often in a jar or on a plate at every table in cheap hole-in-the-wall restaurants. I used to call them “atomic pickles” because of their bright yellow color.
Well with the daikon Jan gave, and my earlier success with radish pickles and cucumber pickles, I decided to attempt some authentic danmuji. I found a recipe, and made some.

It actually came out pretty good. The yellowness comes from turmeric, which has allegedly been linked in recent years with lots of health benefits.
Arthur even ate one.

… so I wanted to make something.
I attempted a berry cobbler, using salmonberries and blueberries.
It tastes delicious. But it didn’t thicken at all. It’s a berry soup. But considering it’s the first cobbler I’ve made in about 25 years, I guess just being edible is an accomplishment.
I’d offer a picture, but… you know.
[daily log: walking, 2km]

Arthur likes to make grilled cheese sandwiches with pickles. Normally he uses a spicy sweet pickle, like the Famous Dave’s brand that he prefers.
Tonight, however, he used my home-made radish pickles. And happily, they were actually pretty good on grilled cheese. Here is a pale pink radish pickle on the grilled cheese – I opened it for the photo op.

I was working on my treehouse. I was using a drill to drill a hole in the tree, to attach my special treehouse mounting brackets I got last year.
The drill had enough torque to drill the hole in the tree. But my hand wasn’t strong enough to hold the drill in place, and I smashed my left index finger against the tree with the drill as is kicked against my grip rotationally.
I took a break from treehouse efforts and made some Chilean-style fish chowder (chupe de pescado) using some freezer-burned salmon and some fresh-caught halibut. You can see a nice chunk of each on the spoon.

I went to a Christmas Concert in Craig today. All the “neighbors” were there – the people who live up and down Port Saint Nicholas Road: Jeri and Karl, Mike and Penny, Gary and Sandy. They’re all retirees. I felt like a youth brigade of one.
Before the concert, Jeri, Karl and I had a late lunch at their friends-in-town, Scott and Mike, both widowers I think. Scott is quite a cook. We were joking  that their houses, side by side, were the “gourmet district” in Craig. We had venison stew that Jeri and Karl had made, and fresh home-baked brown bread, cornbread, lemon pie. Scott had home-made kimchi, too – it’s the best kimchi I’ve had in a long time.

When I was with Michelle, I often made mole poblano – the classic “chocolate chicken” in the old Aztec style. It was one of her favorites.
That was in the 1990s, of course. The last time I made it, I think, was maybe 2006. I never thought to make it since coming here to stay with Arthur because he had declared a preemptive disinterest in such an “abomination of good chocolate.” However, our friend Jan expressed interest in it, when it came up in conversation, so she convinced me to give it a try. I successfully resurrected my old recipe. I’m sure it’s not exactly the same as how I used to make it, but when I taste-tested it I could reasonably declare it “at least as good as restaurant style.”
I was surprised to learn that Arthur had no blender. I find it hard to believe, given his plethora of gadgets of all kind. So I broke out my low tech “pre-war Korean blender” (AKA stone mortar and pestle).  It gave my mole an authentic Aztec flair. The picture shows the work in progress.

The completed sauce is below.

Last night, using leftovers from the previous night, I made a chopped roast hash with potatoes and stuff, and we used the jar of chili sauce that Juli had sent with me to gift to Mark and Amy as garnish. It was pretty good.

Today, I didn’t do a lot. It was one of those “days off” that is part of this cross-country misadventure.
One thing: Mark has his parents old RV in an outdoor storage (guarded parking) location. We went to check on it, and the battery was dead. We got very cold taking out the battery.

[daily log: walking, 1km]

I got one full day off before the slew of appointments resume with Arthur.

So we took a walk up to the tree farm. There were a lot of ripe blackberries along the road, so he and I picked berries, and brought them back to Juli's house. Juli made a blackberry pie.

Blackberries remind me of my childhood, since my home in northern California was surrounded, as Juli's home is, with abundant wild blackberries.

My body is still sore and achey from my storage unit adventures last week.

[daily log: walking, 4km]

When I lived in Valdivia, Chile, in 1994, I stayed at a guesthouse (casa de huéspedes) while I took classes at the Universidad Austral, which was a kilometer walk across the river on the island. That was a very cold several months, living there, because it was the Chilean winter, August-October, and the Chileans don't believe in any kind of central heating, and the guesthouse wouldn't allow electric space-heaters in our rooms.

It only snowed once, but it was always hovering right above freezing, with neverending drizzle and rain and overcast skies. So I would huddle in the guesthouse's dining room, by a wood stove there, when it was lit. The landlady's cooking was a unique style in my experience. She was German-Chilean, but several generations removed from Germany. I have no idea what to call her cuisine. What was memorable were the single-dish meals she served, made of pasta or rice, always with some kind of tomato-based sauce, sometimes with meat, generally with beans, and always with a fried egg or two on top, which I would mash into the concoction before eating. It wasn't particularly delicious, but it was always reliable and filling. I don't know if this cooking style is common in Chilean homes, or even, specifically, southern Chilean or German-Chilean traditions, or if it was more idiosyncratic to that guesthouse's landlady. I did experience something similar at a hotel restaurant in Punta Arenas, but with ñoquis (gnocchi), possibly due to the strong Argentinian influence down there (Punta Arenas is only connected to the rest of Chile by road via Argentina), as I think of ñoquis as being very characteristically Argentinian.

Sometimes, in the years since, I have made various half-hearted efforts to recreate what I think of "Chilean tomato glop with egg". The other day, I can proudly say, I came as close as I ever have to recreating the look and feel of the original. I was finishing off a batch of rice, using a fresh tomato and onion and some leftover chopped ham, I added in half a can of Mexican canned beans (yes, you can buy that in Korea) and two poached eggs. I can't comment on the taste aspect, given the radical transformations my taste-buds have undergone in the intervening years. But anyway, I was happy with having accomplished it. So I took a picture.

[daily log: walking, 6.5km]

If you have watched this blog over many long years, you know I happen to like pea soup.
My mother likes to cook sometimes, so when she asked if there was anything I was craving, I told her I hadn’t made pea soup for myself in a long time. I think I just got lazy, after the cancer thing dulled my tasting ability, and I just haven’t bothered in recent years, since everything I make that I crave ends up being a bit disappointing.
Anyway, we bought the ingredients and she made pea soup. In fact, I already knew it wasn’t something she commonly made – I grew to like it after I was living on my own – it’s not anything like a “nostalgia” dish from my childhood. But I was quite surprised when she announced, after we were eating it for dinner, that it was the first time she’d made pea soup.
It was a good pea soup, I think.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]