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유자차

a friend recommended we buy some 유자차 when ben had a cold. ben made it as tea, as our friend had suggested he do. he didn't care for it much.

i ignored it in the fridge for a few months until the day that i had a taste for, well, marmelade. and i found that 유자차 did the job quite nicely.

i have yet to tell any korean friends or acquaintances "hey, i put 유자차 on peanut butter sandwiches -- and i sometimes put it in yogurt, and in cottage cheese." i'm interested to see what the reaction will be.

come on, somebody uses this stuff for something other than just tea, right? it's got that perfect sweet/bitterness, all the citrus shreds are so nice... i bet if you mix some of this stuff into pound cake batter it's pretty good, too. i think there are more applications for it than have been yet tried.

anybody else use 유자차 in anything other than hot water?

rainy day, korean cooking

our social plans of playground and walk to south street with jaime and abby got rained out today. for now, the baby is in her bumbo seat listening to yo-yo ma's bach cello suites, and i have started some cooking.

our korean dishes have always been pretty limited at home. we make 김치, usually a cabbage and daikon one from a madhur jaffrey cookbook. i have never preferred any kimchi recipe to that one. from the korean kitchen by copeland marks, we have for years made 닭고추장보금 (i may go try to look up that spelling in hangul and correct it later) -- dak gochu jang boekum -- which we make with bite-sized pieces of chicken thigh meat. we have taken it to picnics and seen it disappear, and we eat it all year long, calling it "korean chicken".

we do make 돌솓 비빔밥 in stone bowls, and in these bowls i once made ben a "bibimbirthday cake" which very realistically mimicked a bowl of bibimbap, right down to the raw egg on top (created with mango sorbet). a how-to for this cake was printed in one of the first issues of korean quarterly to which i contributed.

this past winter i began extending my repetoire of korean dishes to include 김치 찌개, in which i frequently used dried shitake mushrooms and fresh spinach. pulmuone brand foods (풀무원) makes a type of tofu that i particularly like to use in this, and it is marked 째개용 on the package, which might mean "jigae-style" or "good for stews". maybe someone will tell me.

but that was pretty much the extent of my korean cooking until recently, when i attempted -- and succeeded with -- 냉면. we needed something for summer, and although 냉면 creates a few hours of hot kitchen with the stock-making and egg-boiling, it pays off over the next few das when it is very easy to make a delicious -- cool -- meal.

so my confidence was up when i found migi's kitchen and did indeed make the best 떡볶이 i have ever tasted. and it's not much harder to make than, say, popcorn! 정말!

so, while on this rainy day i am merely making stock for 냉면 and some 김치, i am thinking about getting fancy soon and trying migi's recipe for 딸기 수제비 -- strawberry gnocci, which is made in a broth that contains vegetables and some dried anchovies and kelp.

붕어빵/goldfish bread (aka "chocolate fish waffles")

while at the SUPER H-MART in atlanta georgia in february, we happened upon some snacks being made under a sign that said "FISH WAFFLES".

we were willing to try fish waffles. there was little risk; we saw that they were not fish-flavored waffles, but simply sweet, filled waffles made in fish-shaped irons. they came with two filling choices: red bean, or chocolate.

having at some point convinced myself that i do not like sweet red bean paste (i since find that i was wrong about that), we ordered some chocolate-filled fish waffles.

there was an older man making them, and watching me take pictures of him making them. "재미있어요!" i told him. ("it's interesting!") "재미있어요," he agreed.

when e-mailing artist sunkoo yuh -- whom we had been visiting in georgia -- later, he told me that these "fish waffles" were called 붕어빵. i didn't ask for a literal translation, but later, watching one of our favorite k-dramas, 미우나 고우나 (likeable or not), we saw a character bring "fish waffles" home -- referring to them as "goldfish bread".

we have since seen that 붕어빵 can be purchased frozen. we have yet to try any of the make-at-home types. but next time we are in atlanta... it's back to the irons at SUPER H-MART for us. 정말 맛있었어요!