I’ve just been informed that my footage of last year’s landslide at the EBS studios will be on “Serial Killer Earth,” a series on H2 (I think that means History Channel 2). It will first air on Saturday night (June 30th) and will repeat at different times.
Here’s some of my video.
Hardtack and Gruel have gone to the studio and recorded a demo of their crowd pleaser Ojjingga–an anti-ode to the smelly leathery dried pub grub that’s dropped in front of drinkers in Korean hofs.
You can listen to it here and download it from Reverb Nation.
[audio:https://zenkimchi.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Hardtack-and-Gruel-Ojjinga.mp3|titles=Hardtack and Gruel – Ojjingga]Last weekend was quite hectic, filled with pleasant surprises, new and old friends, and lots of (thoughts, plans, preparations, and consumption of) food, food, food. It started with Korea Day on Friday, my dear friends’ wedding on Saturday, and finally a day of new yet familiar experiences on Sunday.
On Sunday, people from tvK, a Korean cable station based in L.A., came out to my place to interview me about Korean food and my blog and to film my cooking for a dinner gathering with friends, as part of a documentary they are making about Koreans in the U.S. and Korean food.
The first change after my sister and I heard the news of tvK’s visit was totally unrelated to food. Within a day, my sister’s giant backpack sitting at the corner of the room for the last 2 months was removed. This meant that something else had to be moved to make room for the backpack, which resulted in cleaning and reorganizing the whole apartment…just to hide one giant backpack.
As for food, the main focus, I wanted to prepare dishes for my friends who already know the basic items of Korean food and have done bulgogi and galbi BBQ many times over. I wanted my friends to try something different, something that they wouldn’t know to order or might not find at a Korean restaurant, but still familiar, homey Korean flavors, with, of course, my own spin.
So here is how it went.
Homemade Tofu (두부; with sesame sauce and pickled Jalapeno bits)
Biji Ssambap (비지 쌈밥; sticky brown rice mixed with toasted soybean pulp, seasoned with doenjang sauce wrapped in perilla leaves)
Yukgaejang Jorim in Danhobak Bowl (육개장 조림 in 단호박; brisket reduced in gochujang sauce, with shiitake mushrooms and sliced rice cakes, topped with mozzarella cheese, served in kabocha bowl)
Shikhye Patbingsu (식혜 팥빙수; sweet rice-malted barley granita with sweetened red beans, rice cake morsels, mango dice, and mint leaves)
After an evening of fun dinner with friends, I woke up in the middle of the night with the feeling of horror that the TV camera probably captured all my idiosyncrasies, absurd craziness, and weird twitches that I’ve been blissfully unaware of all my life. Then, I gladly remembered that I was still hungover and fell asleep again.
I don’t know if/when the documentary will air in New York yet. Regardless, it gave me a fun excuse to think more about food for a whole week. I am also grateful that it gave me a chance to capture a moment in my cooking life with my dear sister and friends.
KOREAN WORDS
tofu 두부 (du bu)
brown rice 현미 (hyeon mi)
sesame 깨 (kkae)
It’s already started, but catch ZenKimchi community and expat favorite Chef Hu-nam Kim of Star Chef on EBS all this week. Here are the details.
Show Name: 최고의 요리비결 (Best Cook’s Recipe) – EBS
Mon. August 10 – Fri. August 15
11:00 – 11:30 a.m.
Rebroadcast
Saturday, August 16
12:00 – 2:30
Longtime Korea gadfly Michael Breen has posted a great tongue-in-cheek rundown of how Korea will be in 2068. Despite the head-scratching political overtones (“Many, including Korea, have adopted a flat tax regime”) and ironic cheerleading of its published source (“The Coryo Times, formerly known as the Korea Times, is the most widely read newspaper in the country and the leading daily in East Asia”), it’s particularly entertaining towards the end, where it comes to dining life.
The Korean diet has changed somewhat in recent decades and Koreans have developed a taste for what was once considered foreign food. Most small towns have Indian, Thai, Ethiopian and Lebanese restaurants.
With the departure of the Blue House to Gaeseong, the area around the old Gyeongbok Palace in Seoul is now a vibrant restaurant center featuring every type of cuisine imaginable. Several of the world’s top chefs work there and at any given time, two or three establishments feature in the Hankook Tire Guide’s list of top 20 restaurants in the world.
Pretty funny!
I’ve gone back to trying to watch “Shikgaek,” or as the English blogs now call it, “Gourmet.”
Call me a curmudgeon. The food porn on the show just ain’t doin’ it for me. They show many things that look pretty, usually in concentric circles, but little of it looks actually tasty–or original.
So get ready for a little snarkfest. Dramabeans recently posted some recent food captures from the show. Let’s look at them.
Here we have a Pumpkin Cheesecake, straight from the local Paris Baguette, complete with chocolate shavings. I’m suspicious on how well chocolate works with pumpkin, but chocolate shavings always mean “gourmet.” And it wouldn’t be a pumpkin cheesecake with out a slice of it on there.
Look pretty. Betcha they’ll break half your incisors. You know they whipped the cookies up quickly and spent hours putting all the nuts on with tweezers.
Ooh, Brownies covered in pottery glaze. And more tweezer-placed pine nuts.
Alas, the Chicken Fingers course. Gotta remember the curly lettuce. Nothing says ’60s haute cuisine like curly lettuce.
My guess is that it’s a Watermelon Granita (basically shaved watermelon ice) in a bowl of iced tea with a single spearmint on top. I’m scared to guess what the amoeba like creature is hiding under the frozen watermelon. I believe it’s waiting to jump out and latch on the diner’s face as soon as his spoon touches it.
Kimbap! With beef instead of seaweed. How creative! Like German Rouladen but–KIMBAP.
What will they think of next? </sarcasm>
Oh, the concentric circles idea. That always worked in ’60s haute cuisine (did I make that comparison before). And we have what I guess is a minimalist clear consomme or water with grass trimmings in it. Reminds me of something I saw in the Gallery of Regrettable Foods.
When you take your dog for a walk, why bother scooping his business in a plastic bag? Serve it on a plate in front of a prom dress.
I guess we’re tackling the classic French Napoleon. Or it’s a hamburger that someone pushed through a cylinder and leaned the Saddest Asparagus in the Worldâ„¢ on it.
More concentric circles. Move along, folks.
Oh, here’s a classic. Beef and Cabbage. Again, I think they’re ripping off a page from the Gallery of Regrettable Foods.
It’s circular, but at least it’s traditional.
Cow Patties and Grass Clippings. Are those mushrooms growing on those cow chips?
Maybe not, but they’re growing on these.
“HELP! Get us out of these concentric circles!”
A Sweet Potato Cake, from either Paris Baguette or Tours le Jours, with Unnamed Sea Creatureâ„¢. Always an enticing combination. Don’t forget the berries, carrots, cucumbers and twig placed so skillfully with tweezers.
Okay, Raw Fish on Rice Noodles. Looks like a firm one, like monkfish. Actually, that’s a pretty good idea.
Oh, we gotta finish with the Samgyetang. I don’t see how the chef’s Samgyetang is different than my local restaurant’s Samgyetang. I guess they convey how it’s different and tasty by inserting that bubbling sound effect they always do in Korean food commercials.
So, what I’m getting from this show is that Korean gourmet cuisine needs to
In the spirit of The Amateur Gourmet, I threw together a musical number for the SeoulPodcast about the beef hysteria.
I watched the first episode of Shikgaek Tuesday night. I’ll keep watching it for the food, even though it suffers from the same awkwardness and, well, either the show misses some cogent points, or I’m missing them.
The Joshing Gnome wrote a post about it:
Shikgaek (식객) is, for those of you who don’t know, was originally a very popular and pretty entertaining comic book about Korean food. It was sort of the Korean version of the Japanese wine comic Drops of God. Incidentally, the guy who wrote Shikgaek was originally going to write a comic about wine, but my old nemesis Rhie Won-bok beat him to the punch. Then he briefly considered doing a comic about soju but it turns our there’s already a sixty-part series about soju called “The Devil’s Piss”.
Anyway, the comic book, I feel I should underscore, is not bad. The television show, however, is likely to become very bad as it goes on.
In tonight’s episode there were already two scenes of white people marveling as the same phonetic English speaking chef explains about the food. “˜This idge called ddeok. It idge a rice cake. It idge a Ko-ree-an traditional pood.’
White guy: “˜What’s this on top’
“˜Dat idge a jujube’
White people (to each other): “˜Ooh, Aah.’
But here’s the scene that killed me. The old chef master gets some kind of special fish fresh from the seashore and brings it into his kitchen. There are about twenty young chefs doing nothing but watching as the old man proceeds to choose a knife out of a collection of large knives and . . .
He cuts the fish into four pieces. The young chefs are agog. He then lifts the lid off a pot of light brown broth and puts the fish in the pot. Then he sprinkles a little salt in. Then he sprinkles some sliced red and green pepper on top. Then he puts the lid on and leaves. All the young chefs are in awe at this.
Then charisma-free heartthrob Kim Rae-won takes out a ladle and takes a sip of the broth. The look on his face is one of transcendent awe. It’s like he’s looking into the light show from the end of 2001. Or he hates it. It was not clear to me at the time. I thought he was going to say “˜The old man is losing his touch, watch me fix this train wreck.’ and proceed to become the “˜Best Chef’ of the show’s English title. Instead he passes the ladle to English explanation guy and before he could phonetically say “˜In duh Choseon dynasuh-ty . . .’ he too was marveling at the genius that was essentially the same stuff people eat all the time except a guy at a really expensive restaurant had made it. I imagined how hard it must be to convey the awesome power of food that is a) not as tasty as regular everyday food and b) gallingly the same as regular everyday food.
ZenKimchi Joe, I know you said you’re going to watch this show, but do yourself a favor and just read the comic.
Update: I watched the rest of the episode and I changed my mind. I will watch this show, if only because it reminds me so very much of the episode of Futurama where Bender tried to become the Iron Chef. Except Kim Rae-won is more mechanical than Bender.
Here was my response:
I watched that episode and was baffled by those two scenes myself. I cringed at the English scene. Chefs don’t come to a table to give people dictionary definitions of what they’re eating. They’re expected to tell a story or the process behind the food to enhance the diners’ enjoyment. I was expecting him to go on saying, “This is plate. This is cup. This is rice. Korea eat rice.”
The fish scene–thanks for helping me figure out I wasn’t crazy for missing the significance. These past two weeks, I myself have been working on my fish cleaning and filleting techniques to make some simple Western fish dishes. But Mr. Old Dude went in there, scaled the fish and just hacked it into four parts the same way Asians do chicken. There’s no thought given to the anatomy of the animal. Just hack it to pieces. Dunked it in the pot with some salt.
Now, what was this magical flavor?
In fact, the fish hadn’t been in the pot long enough to do ANYTHING before Pretty Boy Chef tasted it and gave the spoon to Jude Law Chef. And even if it tastes amazing, it would be because of the quality of the fish, not the knife skills of Jason Voorhees.
Okay, help me figure out this part because my Korean is not good enough to follow easily, and The Woman doesn’t explain things to me when she’s watching TV.
Old Dude Chef and Pretty Boy Chef are hunting for this special line-caught fish. They finally find it. Pretty Boy Chef then goes and gets tossaway fish from some ajummas.
A few scenes later, he’s staying up all night perfecting a fish soup. Was he using those same throwaway fish? And by manipulating some spices (I remember him listing the ingredients), he made this jaw-dropping soup?
What’s the message here?
Good ingredients don’t matter because you can always cover it up with spices?
Nonetheless, the production values looked slightly better than a lot of the dramas. And I’m really watching it for the food, not the plot. If I learn something about the history of some dishes or why certain foods are special it’ll be worth sitting through the stiff awkward scenes with foreigners. And wasn’t that the most lifeless lawn party?