Category: Food & Drink

Frankly, “Riceball & Tortilla” sounds like the ill-conceived name of a 1970’s TV dramedy with a politically-incorrect ethnic twist, perhaps in the buddy-cop genre (e.g. Starsky and Hutch, Cagney and Lacey).

Instead, it’s the name of a fast-food joint in my neighborhood. One of my coworkers brought me something from there – a 주먹밥 (which I’ve blogged before) but coated in something vaguely resembling corn meal instead of seaweed – I guess that’s the “tortilla” part of the name. In Korean, it’s named 주먹밥&또띠아 전문점 [ju-meok-bap & tto-tti-a jeon-mun-jeom = riceball & “tortilla” specialty shop].

Here’s a picture of the container. I ate the actual riceball before taking a picture – sorry.

It’s not bad. I like the kind with seaweed on the outside, better.

바지락 [ba-ji-rak] is a small clam. Koreans love seafood, and I’ve been getting adventurous with the instant-foods aisle in the supermarket (see e.g. my recent post on nurungji). So I bought some ramen-looking stuff (that also claims to be lo-calorie and not fried – “notfrying” in English on the label) that was called 바지락. Last night, when I opened the package, I was surprised to find some actual vacuum-packed clams! And it cooked up pretty delicious.

Here’s a tear-down (i.e. pictures).

I’m not going to make any assertions or assumptions about healthfulness – I’m sure it’s packed with preservatives and MSG and who knows what else. But it was nevertheless pretty tasty.

I wrote once before about the Korean flavor called “누룽지” [nu-rung-ji = scorched rice] It was a time when I went through a short-time obsession with scorched-rice-flavored candy. Recently, I was wandering the aisles of my neighborhood supermarket, and beheld the product shown in the photo at right: “옛날 구수한 누룽지” (yet-nal gu-su-han nu-rung-ji = “old time savory scorched rice”]. It was on the same shelf as the multitudes of instant soups and ramens, so I adduced it was an instant product in the just-add-hot-water variety.

In the time since having scorched-rice candy, a little over a year ago, I have also had the experience of having “real” nurungji. Here’s how it works. Cooked rice is often served in heated stone or ceramic bowls – sufficiently heated that it burns onto the sides and bottom of the containers. This is “scorched rice.” Once you’ve managed to eat all the rice out of the heated bowl, you pour boiling water into the bowl and use a spoon to scrape and stir everything around unsticking the scorched rice from the bottom and sides of the bowl. Rather than throw this away (as might be done in the US), this soupy substance eaten as a delicacy.

I guess the flavor grows on you. It’s kind of porridgy. And I’ve always liked porridges of various sorts. I like that it’s sufficiently esteemed in Korea to have turned into an instant food. I bought some, and had it, and it’s grown on me. Little packets of dried out, pre-cooked, scorched rice. You add hot water, and it’s a delicious snack.

Reading the ingredients, it consists of nothing but rice (product of Korea!) and salt (not over-salted, either). I’ve bought this product several times, now. I eat it just as you might eat a bowl of hot oatmeal. Sometimes I Americanize it into a true breakfast-style porridge, by adding butter or brown sugar (I’m sure this would utterly horrify Koreans). Other times I have it with a side of kimchi and drink oksususuyeomcha (corn-tassle tea), more Korean-style. 
Welcome to the world of Korean comfort-food.

I found, in my local supermarket, for the first time ever, grapefruit. From California. Labelled as 자몽 [ja-mong], which I think is a Korean neologism for grapefruit – the dictionary gives the Konglishy 그레이프프루트 [geureipeupeuruteu]. In the dictionary, 자몽 is given as meaning citron, which is a different kind of citrus altogether.  But regardless, this is the first time I’ve ever seen grapefruit in the produce aisle anywhere in Korea.  I bought some – because I love grapefruit.  So much for living on local food, low carbon footprint, right?
I made some pasta with tomatoes, mushrooms, onions and garlic, and had dinner. And I cut sections of grapefruit and ate them as dessert. Kind of a boring life I have, I know.

I was watching this Korean drama, but the sites I habitually use to download English subtitled versions of the dramas are rapidly disappearing – the copyright police seem to be active. So I was left hanging, unable to watch the rest of the series. I’m annoyed by this – the pay site that had subtitles was so horrible (streaming at very low speeds and quality such that the shows were essentially impossible to watch) I quit my membership. If anyone reading this has advice on where to find subtitled Korean TV materials, please, please help me.

Saturday night my friend Basil was visiting up from Gwangju, where he now works, and we went to that Russian place he introduced me to.  I had borsht and svekolny (beet/garlic salad). It was really good. I wonder where one can find beets in Korea? I want to make my own borsht, but borsht without beets is sacrilegious. I bought some brown rye bread from the Russian bakery in the same neighborhood there – the clerk speaking Russian and me speaking Korean, and sort of communicating – and I had some of that, toasted, as breakfast.

Yesterday was a long day at work. It’s the time of month when we have to post grades and comments about students into the giant, macro-infested spreadsheet that serves as the hagwon student database system. Actually, the spreadsheet’s not bad for an ad hoc job – I’ve sometimes admired its low-budget ingenuity. Anyway, at least I felt competent to do this job:  it’s a good feeling of accomplishment when you can write personalized comments about 80 students and remember each of their faces and personalities.

Earlier in the day, I’d come in earlier than usual because I have my current “frontloaded” schedule that is all-elementary. I’m putting a lot of work on my “little ones” – mostly first-graders that have felt kind of challenging lately, walking the fine line between being entertaining for the students and parental expectations that they will come home acting as if they were learning something. Putting together a scheme for phonics flashcards (spelling simple words like cat and cake), I want to implement some kind of regular mini-quiz that’s not too painful for the students but that give me a sense of whether or not they’re making any progress.

I came home and faced the leftovers in my fridge. I like to cook, as I’ve said, but cooking alone always leads to leftovers, and having such a small fridge (it’s essentially what would be called a “dorm room” fridge in the US) means I have to get brutal and triage my leftovers pretty regularly – I end up throwing away things that don’t get eaten far too often, and that induces feelings of guilt, which leads to me cooking less, which leads to me feeling annoyed with my diet.

Um. What was I saying? I found some beans in my fridge and finished them off, after heating them up for an extra-extended period because I was worrying they might have something growing in them. They tasted good. And I woke up this morning.

Over the weekend I had made a tasty curry-coleslaw (see picture), using some end-of-its-natural-life cabbage and the infinite supply of gift-apples-in-a-box that I received as a Chuseok gift from my employer (see other picture – note standard-issue excessive packaging).

That coleslaw is keeping well, so far. But I had to throw out some rice and broccoli and mushrooms into the compost bin downstairs. Isn’t it cool, by the way, that big-city apartments in Ilsan give residents the opportunity to segregate their organic garbage? Not that I have huge amount of faith that anything useful is being done with it… it might be being mixed in with the regular garbage at the landfill, as happens so often in the US, for example. But one might be pleasantly surprised – Koreans seem predisposed, in some ways (e.g. by the density of their society, and its historically recent extreme poverty), to creating a more sustainable version of consumerism.

I ate dinner.

A very Korean dinner. To start with, I went shopping at the market area east of the 팔달문 (Paldalmun, which is the south gate of the city wall), rather than at a 슈퍼 (shu-pa = supermarket).  I got three kinds of kimchi (regular, “white” and radish), I got some tiny dried fish that I still haven’t figured out what they’re called [update, 4 hours later: my friends Christine and Jinhee both made comments and told me what they’re called. 멸치 = myulchi, little dried anchovies. I’ll put a picture down at the bottom of this entry. Thanks!], I got 오뎅 (odeng = “fish sausage”) and a bag of polished (sticky) rice. Finally, I got some 김 (kim = “dried squares of seaweed”).

I came back to the kitchen at my guesthouse. I stir-fried some chopped onions with the odeng and a dash of salt. I cooked rice in the rice cooker.  I put my varieties of kimchi in tupperware buckets. And I sat down with the guesthouse owner-guy to a meal cooked rice, kimchi in containers, tiny fish, kim, and the bokkeum odeng wa yangpa, eating chopsticksfull of each thing from each container with the rice.

I’ve decided to stay in this guesthouse in Suwon. It’s terribly inconvenient, since my class is in Gangnam, but the rent here simply can’t be beat.  And the owner is really friendly without being overbearing. The regular nightly charge is only 20,000 won (around $18 at current exchange rates), but the owner gave me a 50% discount if I committed to staying a full month. That means less than $10 per night – cheaper than rent in a regular studio apartment anywhere in Seoul (and that would require a 1 year contract). There’s internet here, and a kitchen and all the basic necessities.  So even with the cost of the commute (about $5 per day round trip to Gangnam), it’s a pretty darn inexpensive living situation.

I can use the commute time to veg out or study or whatever. It’s about an hour on a direct Suwon-Gangnam bus (the #3000 is almost door-to-door, guesthouse to hagwon), or a slightly circuitous subway + bus takes about an hour and a half (but runs more frequently, so timing is less of an issue).
Finally, Suwon has grown on me a little bit, in its extraordinarily mercantile, unglamorous way – it’s kind of the polar opposite of the Beverly-Hills-like character of Gangnam. A nice antidote, as it were, at the close of each day’s studying.