Merwil and Maangchi

I was laying on the floor in the room “Andy” uses as an office the other day like a perfectly normal person who has just come home from work, to have a totally adult conversation while petting the beige shag carpet that has def been there since the house was built.  We (I) lay there, discussing life, the universe, and everything, when low and behold my eyes caught upon a book I hadn’t seen in a while.  A cookbook.  A very specific cookbook called Maangchi's Real Korean Cooking, about making authentic Korean food at home. 

Maangchi means "hammer" and I think that means she will eff you up.

But like, really, I have no idea.

I bought this cookbook after two things happened: one, a friend of ours came to visit who is Korean and loves to cook, and he made us the twice fried chicken recipe.  It was a raucous night of middle-aged nerd fun: a reasonable but sufficient number of craft beers followed by board games, but the most memorable thing was the cooking and the food.  This may be because the craft beers fuzzed the rest of the night up, but also because the food was super good.  

There was a whole thing where we had to find a certain cooking tool.  This all happened after a whiskey and barbecue festival, so we were definitely in the best mindset to have this adventure.  We wandered the aisles of some urban ethnic grocery, tipsy and uncomfortably full, and I bought (and ate) an entire carton of strawberries and now we own this.

I know who I am, Reader.

The second thing happened when I went to another night of high nerditry, a table top Dungeons and Dragons role playing game that I’ve been in for a few years now.  It’s way over on the other side of town, and so I took advantage of the opportunity to hit up the Highway of Asian Culinary Delight that the game is near for dinner.  It’s a huge thriving immigrant community and filled with the most delicious restaurants, and since it’s not near me and I had time, I decided to make a dinner plan.  

The prize at the center of the labyrinth!

I found a little Korean restaurant online, added an additional 20 minutes to my drive time because it’s not in the shopping center, it is around and behind the shopping center through a maze of labyrinthine interconnecting parking lots, and sat down to eat.

I don’t know what I was thinking, but what I got was a menu entirely in, presumably, Korean, sprinkled with some enticing pictures.  Maybe now is the time to mention I haven’t eaten much Korean food, or experienced much Korean culture, besides the everything-in-a-bowl place by the college campus near work and watching a show on Korean street food during the Olympics where I learned that everything is cut with scissors.

Why doesn't everyone do this? 
Everyone should do this.

I looked at the bibimbap but I wanted to try something new so I basically pointed at a picture.  The process was intimidating, because I am sitting there being an awkward white girl pointing at a picture on a menu I obviously don’t know what to do with and I am thinking I look like the cultural tourist I am.  LOW AND BEHOLD I looked like way, way more of a white-girl cultural-tourist than I had yet realized, but we’ll get to that.  My intimidation only grew when my bowl of yummy came accompanied by a bowl of broth and like nine other little tiny bowls with veggies and saucy stuff in them, only some of which I could identify.  Exhibit A, when I cleaned out one tiny side bowl of deliciousness, the waitress came to ask if I wanted more pickled celery and I had no idea what she was talking about til she pointed at the empty bowl.  Looking at the whole spread, I was painfully aware that there is a way to do this and I do not know what that way is.  Worth mentioning, this is how literally every Korean meal works, but I didn't know, so I just sat there having no idea what to do with my hands.  So now I am being a rude cultural tourist, and that makes me a jerk.  But a jerk with a happy belly—it was delicious.

Like this.  They all (I think?  Again, I really don't know.) look like this.

But wait!  How much of a jerk am I? Well, adding to my too-little-too-late self awareness was the fact that, since I was eating alone, I had brought a book.  What book?  Just the book I happened to be reading, which happened to be Tai-Pan by James Clavel.  It is, IMO, a great read, I would say as good as Shogun before it if you’re into that sort of thing (That sort of thing being a well written, well researched, epic tome that is definitely written by a British dude about life in an Asian country hundreds of years ago that is definitely centered on British Heroes and their respective Asian Love Interests.  I mean, it’s well done for what it is, but it is what it is.) 

Also, because I heart Red Pants and I don’t usually dress to be in public so I take the chance where I can get it, I had on his t shirt to go to my nerd game. 

He is still perfect.

This is how I felt about it.

So there I sit in my Shinsuke Nakamura shirt (he is Japanese, if you’re keeping score at home), reading Tai-Pan (a tale of the origins of Hong Kong by a white, British man about a white, British man), eating something I can’t say out loud at a Korean restaurant, and eating it wrong.  Behold the white girl in her natural environment: oblivious and a little douche-y.

So the experience stayed with me and I was like, that was super delicious but also what was it and how do you do it like not-a-jerk? Maybe, I thought, I should learn something about this food I want to eat so I can at least come correct, act like I’ve been there before.  Of course I remembered the book our friend brought over, and I decided to bury my embarrassment in further research (common habitat of the North American White Girl).  

This decision, once the cookbook arrived, lasted like 20 min—I was quickly intimidated by the book, which is not intimidating at all btw, but does absolutely involve lots of ingredients that are not exactly hard to come by but I certainly didn’t have.  Also I am not that person who wants to sit and read a cookbook like a novel.  I Amazon-Primed some sweet potato noodles I never used, “Andy” made the twice-fried chicken again, it was delicious, and the book went on the shelf.  (I did eventually use the noodles but not for any Korean recipe, just because I always buy dry goods that seem interesting or useful and then they sit in the pantry forever and eventually I put them on the dry erase board in the kitchen to remind myself to use them and anyway, we’ve been eating a lot of Israeli couscous recently.)  So I put the book on a shelf, it got moved at some point, and I never really thought about it again.

Until, on my carpet tour of the upstairs, I picked it back up. 

Look at this.  Don't you want to eat this??

This is a good book.  It is approachable, it is written for people who are not familiar with Korean culture or fancy cooking, and it’s appealingly full of great pictures and a readable font.  Again, if you want to do it right, there are some specific ingredients you need to find but they’re all findable in this modern era of the internet and Asian farmers markets.  Also she lists usable substitutes. She even has a list, in the introduction, of the 5ish ingredients she takes with her whenever she travels because they are enough, and it’s all findable stuff, most of which we already have.  

Looook atttt thiiiiiiissss how good does
this look??!?!?!!

Had I done more than skim and be intimidated when the book arrived, I might have noticed this.  

Most meals do involve a number of dishes and a number of tiny side dishes such as I encountered at my foray into the restaurant of my happy-bellied shame.  There is also, if you actually read the book, a description of how to eat a Korean meal when you think you ordered one thing but like a hundred bowls show up at your table. 

To do a full ornate dinner once-off can be a lot, if you want to do it all and do it right.  BUT if you are doing it regularly, the author says, you can batch-make a bunch of this stuff (like your pickled side dishes, your kimchi, your broth) and she is happy to show you how and answer sweet questions from dummies like me on her blog.  And all the pictures make you drool, and all those projects are right up my alley. 

LoOk At iTtT##$))DD@!!!

So now, I tell myself, I am going to cook my way through this cookbook.  

Some relevant facts about me and cooking: I don’t really like it, and I don’t have a lot of…what’s the word…concern?...for recipes.  I mean it says shallots but we have onions so it’s fine.  It says 3 minutes, but I know how to saute so we're going to work it out.  This is sometimes a point of

contention between “Andy” and me, “Andy” being a person who uses phrases like flavor profile and me being a person willing to eat cheese on cucumbers if that’s what we have and it will make me not hungry anymore.  

I will look at what ingredients exist in the house and make a meal out of them; “Andy” will look up a recipe and go get the missing ingredient.  Ingredient, Reader!  Singular!  He will go to the store for **A** ingredient! I will glance at a recipe and then measure nothing and assume I understand the basics enough to get there, or at least to some approximation of “there”, whereas “Andy” has a digital version of all of his favorite recipes which he has tweaked and perfected over time and he will print out whichever he is using on a given night and stick it to the fridge where he can see it from over the stove.  He calls my food fusion and I laugh at the idea that there was that much intentionality behind it.

So I don’t love cooking.  

But I LOVE projects. 

This feels like my kind of project.  I mean, it requires homemade broth and fermentation—I’m into it.  So I think to myself, ima Julie and Julia this ish.  (Don’t worry, I will not be blogging each recipe—this is a personal journey and I assume you, Reader, do not care about my childhood memories related to every ingredient or the day I was having when I decided to cook.) [Editorial note: link to any cooking blog.] (Worth mentioning, I do somehow assume you care about the rest of these meandering stories so...maybe I shouldn't be throwing shade.)

(Also, like…am I really going to cook my way through a cookbook?  Or am I just going to make a few meals then fill our house with the smells of fermenting kimchi?)

"Andy" does not love those smells but that sucker said yes
and now he's locked in here with me.

So far I have made a few attempts.  But like…with caveats.  First, I hate going to the grocery store, esp if I’m already home and not mentally prepared to go back out.  Because it takes mental preparation.  (WHO GOES ALL THE WAY TO THE STORE FOR ONE INGREDIENT???? A good teammate, that’s who.)  Second, we just got all married and stuff.  Funds are tight and going on a “let’s stock the kitchen for Korean Cuisine!” adventure is not happening.  So we’re making it work from found objects already in the kitchen.

All of that is to say, this is not the meal I made.  Neither, precisely, is this or this.  They were similar in broad strokes and when you squint.  But everything has been easy and delicious!  And I got to use eggplant out of my garden (which is important because I am growing too much eggplant)!  And I used some of those frozen tilapia things I always buy but, like dried goods that come to our pantry to die, never use!  So these are wins!

Making your own fermented soy paste blocks takes…like…a year.  So that’s a longer term project, but as soon as I figure out where I can hang those suckers up to dry, it is on.

Happy eating, Reader!