(no subject)
(written on Saturday)
Culinarily speaking, it's been an interesting day.
I woke late, managing to sleep through a man enthusiastically making use of a megaphone, the sound echoing up through the valley and finally penetrating two sets of windows (or perhaps sneakily going round the back and slipping through the other window and coming through my bedroom door...). As I walked down the steep road towards the center of town, however, my keen observational skills immediately picked up on the brightly colored umbrellas hiding the man with the megaphone from my sight in the streets below. Lo and behold, twas a market day (any day ending in a 4 or 9) and all the streetside vendors, cotton candy machines, and traveling salespeople had come out.
Imagine if you can Portland's Saturday Market on Sunday. It's smaller, some of the stalls are missing like gaps in a row of teeth, and there are much much fewer people wandering around. Now imagine you are at least a foot taller than anyone else and wearing purple face paint. Not everyone will stare at you (especially not in Portland) but enough will to make you self-conscious. Just keep walking and keep your eyes on the merchandise like everybody else, and try not to estimate the sound volume of whispers before you versus behind you.
I have to say, Koreans can eat cute fluffy white puppies which beg for your affection all day long. It's like cows in America--hypothetically I hold quite strong beliefs that humans should only eat animals that have been raised and killed humanely (with quite high standards for what counts as "humane"). In actuality, as I am not faced with the grisly reality of intensive cattle farms and slaughterhouse deaths every time I look at a steak, I usually eat it. I don't see them kill the dogs, so I pretend it's done humanely and I don't care.
BUT - I'm seriously bothered by cruelty to octopi. In the fishy section of the market, stationed centrally in a parking lot where women set up large collapsable tubs full of live squid and spread gutted fish out on display, there was a medium-sized octopus lying on a platter, alive, attempting to inflate and deflate itself to breathe and probably to escape. It had clearly been there for several hours already, and had lost the ability to even attempt to slither off the plate. Octopi in tiny buckets, caught in mesh bags so they can't escape, slumped like rubbery jello alive and out of the water...It bugs me. I'm fine with eating octopi. I have done so, and will probably do again. I'm just...not okay with them sitting there like that, twitching a tentacle and staring at me with those accusing cephalopodic eyes.
I didn't eat any of that. My culinary adventures for the day consisted of two items: donuts, and the Korean version of a corndog. The donuts were made of a dough that tasted like savory crepes, with a peanut butter center, fried in oil and dipped in sugar. Except for the texture, I felt like someone had violated a peanut butter sandwich with white sugar.
Even more disturbing, on the way home I finally bought one of those things that visually resembles a corndog. I knew what it was. They take one half of a set of disposable chopsticks and skewer a hotdog with it. Then they wrap it in dough, cook it, wrap it in dough again and cook it again, so the dough has two layers before you reach the rather slim hotdog in the middle. Nice enough, right? Korean not-a-corndog, noooooo problem!
The vendor cheerfully dipped it in sugar and then squirted ketchup on top, handing it to me with a big smile. Horrified and fascinated at the same time, I made no objection, paid, and then walked off, contemplating the thing in my hand. Okay, so ketchup is sometimes sweet-sometimes very sweet. I hate sweet ketchup. I also had no idea what taste or texture the dough might have.
In the spirit of anthropological inquiry, I ate it. It was not so bad. The dough wasn't crunchy, it was fluffy and tasted like sweeter kinds of bread. The ketchup was not sweet at all and actually did a lot to cut the sweetness of the sugar. The hotdog tasted overpoweringly like a hotdog, which is why I like them. There is no mystery with hotdogs. They're always going to taste like a hotdog, no matter what kind of mystery meat goes into them.
I'm not saying it's my new favorite food (nothing will ever replace sahm in my heart!), but I would eat it again. Probably soon.
---
Other random thoughts:
The rice is getting heavy, the plants bowed over and browning. Some fields have already been reaped, the rice laid out in sheafs to dry among the short sprays of stubble (I'm pretending I know something about rice farming). Dried fish slices are laid out on canvases in Singi, next to trays of hot peppers. Agriculture isn't like this in the States, but I can't help but feel that having gardens on every spare patch of land, just a row of squash plants by your doorstep...couldn't help but be a good thing. Makes me wonder...if Kangwon-do wasn't so steeply mountainous, would there be any trees left?
Culinarily speaking, it's been an interesting day.
I woke late, managing to sleep through a man enthusiastically making use of a megaphone, the sound echoing up through the valley and finally penetrating two sets of windows (or perhaps sneakily going round the back and slipping through the other window and coming through my bedroom door...). As I walked down the steep road towards the center of town, however, my keen observational skills immediately picked up on the brightly colored umbrellas hiding the man with the megaphone from my sight in the streets below. Lo and behold, twas a market day (any day ending in a 4 or 9) and all the streetside vendors, cotton candy machines, and traveling salespeople had come out.
Imagine if you can Portland's Saturday Market on Sunday. It's smaller, some of the stalls are missing like gaps in a row of teeth, and there are much much fewer people wandering around. Now imagine you are at least a foot taller than anyone else and wearing purple face paint. Not everyone will stare at you (especially not in Portland) but enough will to make you self-conscious. Just keep walking and keep your eyes on the merchandise like everybody else, and try not to estimate the sound volume of whispers before you versus behind you.
I have to say, Koreans can eat cute fluffy white puppies which beg for your affection all day long. It's like cows in America--hypothetically I hold quite strong beliefs that humans should only eat animals that have been raised and killed humanely (with quite high standards for what counts as "humane"). In actuality, as I am not faced with the grisly reality of intensive cattle farms and slaughterhouse deaths every time I look at a steak, I usually eat it. I don't see them kill the dogs, so I pretend it's done humanely and I don't care.
BUT - I'm seriously bothered by cruelty to octopi. In the fishy section of the market, stationed centrally in a parking lot where women set up large collapsable tubs full of live squid and spread gutted fish out on display, there was a medium-sized octopus lying on a platter, alive, attempting to inflate and deflate itself to breathe and probably to escape. It had clearly been there for several hours already, and had lost the ability to even attempt to slither off the plate. Octopi in tiny buckets, caught in mesh bags so they can't escape, slumped like rubbery jello alive and out of the water...It bugs me. I'm fine with eating octopi. I have done so, and will probably do again. I'm just...not okay with them sitting there like that, twitching a tentacle and staring at me with those accusing cephalopodic eyes.
I didn't eat any of that. My culinary adventures for the day consisted of two items: donuts, and the Korean version of a corndog. The donuts were made of a dough that tasted like savory crepes, with a peanut butter center, fried in oil and dipped in sugar. Except for the texture, I felt like someone had violated a peanut butter sandwich with white sugar.
Even more disturbing, on the way home I finally bought one of those things that visually resembles a corndog. I knew what it was. They take one half of a set of disposable chopsticks and skewer a hotdog with it. Then they wrap it in dough, cook it, wrap it in dough again and cook it again, so the dough has two layers before you reach the rather slim hotdog in the middle. Nice enough, right? Korean not-a-corndog, noooooo problem!
The vendor cheerfully dipped it in sugar and then squirted ketchup on top, handing it to me with a big smile. Horrified and fascinated at the same time, I made no objection, paid, and then walked off, contemplating the thing in my hand. Okay, so ketchup is sometimes sweet-sometimes very sweet. I hate sweet ketchup. I also had no idea what taste or texture the dough might have.
In the spirit of anthropological inquiry, I ate it. It was not so bad. The dough wasn't crunchy, it was fluffy and tasted like sweeter kinds of bread. The ketchup was not sweet at all and actually did a lot to cut the sweetness of the sugar. The hotdog tasted overpoweringly like a hotdog, which is why I like them. There is no mystery with hotdogs. They're always going to taste like a hotdog, no matter what kind of mystery meat goes into them.
I'm not saying it's my new favorite food (nothing will ever replace sahm in my heart!), but I would eat it again. Probably soon.
---
Other random thoughts:
The rice is getting heavy, the plants bowed over and browning. Some fields have already been reaped, the rice laid out in sheafs to dry among the short sprays of stubble (I'm pretending I know something about rice farming). Dried fish slices are laid out on canvases in Singi, next to trays of hot peppers. Agriculture isn't like this in the States, but I can't help but feel that having gardens on every spare patch of land, just a row of squash plants by your doorstep...couldn't help but be a good thing. Makes me wonder...if Kangwon-do wasn't so steeply mountainous, would there be any trees left?