Face Stuffing

Before I stop posting about Korea, I obviously have to create an entire food posting - I mean, I practically went to Korea for the food itself. That was the idea behind this entry. However, I started having problems when I began the photo editing process and realized that I had too many food photos for just one blog. Therefore, this is not complete. My Korean-Korean-food photos will never end. (Nor will my love for the food itself.) While double-checking spellings for this entry, I found this insane Wikipedia article. It is definitely more informative than this blog entry.

Living in Italy, I often feel as if I’m surrounded by the most obsessively food-loving culture in the world. I still think that’s true in many ways – Italians put a degree of passion into their food discussions that I can’t imagine anywhere else. However, food in Korea was unforgettable. While we were never subjected to lengthy conversations centered around food topics, we were fed dishes so good (and endless) that we often had to stagger away from the table. Going through my photos, I realized that there are two characteristics to Korean food that I really, really love. First, the concept of banchan, the many many little side dishes that arrive at your table in restaurants (and homes!) during a meal. They’re constantly refilled and infinitely varied. There are countless types of kimchi (which, as you should know, is a pickle marinated in red pepper, anchovy paste, garlic, ginger, and other yummy additions), including cabbage, cucumber, radish, bean sprout, sesame leaf, broccoli, and eggplant. Or you might have dried fish, fresh or fried vegetables, dry or wet seaweed, marinated black beans or peanuts, potato salad and/or acorn jelly. Because of banchan, the table always looks overloaded, as it’s covered with many little white dishes displaying their goodies. The photo below is a good example: the tray on the table is holding JUST my food. It was more than I could eat, obviously.


This is illustrated again in the following photo, which is a dinner we had after visiting the amazing Hainsa Temple. It was truly overwhelming.


The other characteristic of Korean food that I love is the do-it-yourself dining experience. In the US I’d had Korean barbecue before, and it’s great – little did I know that you can also make your own stews and fry your own rice and ramen (? I know) at your table. Here are some examples.

These are two photos from the craziest meal I had in Korea. This is a barbecue spot that Tony found on Jejudo. For roughly $10 dollars, we got free soda, unlimited side dishes (including an amazing potato salad that was so mayonnaise-y that it had arrived in the shape of an ice-cream scoop), endless meat, which was to be barbecued and wrapped in lettuce and sesame leaves, and duenjang chigae – and that was just the first course! After the meat and chigae had been cleared away, we were each expected to finish a massive bowl of cold buckwheat noodles with shredded cucumber. (That was impossible.) It was delicious. Of course, the after-effect of the barbecue is that we exited the restaurant smelling like we had turned into smoked meat. It’s absolutely worth it, though. See the barbecuing process below. And then there’s a close-up of the meat (it may not look so great in the photo, but it was very tasty).





Near the end of the trip, Jean’s younger cousin Minjung brought us, and her best friend, to a restaurant in Taegu that’s very popular with young people. The specialty is fried rice and ramen, and you do it at your table. This was some seriously spicy food, and very entertaining to watch. The adolescent male waiters keep tabs on all the tables simultaneously, adding the different components of the meal in stages.

Here’s the first stage.. The steam from the cooking meat was DEADLY, because of the spiciness of the sauce. You can see Minjung covering her face in the background.


And here she is (on the left) trying to escape from the vapors.


Now he’s adding the rice.


Time to eat!


This spider wasn’t for eating. Instead, she was being raised by the owner of a restaurant on Jejudo. That brown leaf-like thing caught in the web is a moth that had been delivered to her as we ate our meal a few feet away.



We happily watched the killing and mummifying process.


And this is the table set for lunch at Jean’s uncle’s house. While it was obviously terrific to eat out at a restaurant, I was always awestruck by the fact that it was possibly to create so many different dishes at home. At this meal, Jean’s aunt must have served us more than twenty different items that she had made herself.


It’s no surprise that sometimes all this good food made us a little crazy.