Will and Julie Biesinger Family: Korea...food

When you think of Korean food, what do you think? My first thoughts came from the show M*A*S*H*...when Frank thought the Korean's were burying bombs and it just turned out that they were burying Kim chi. Fast forward a few years to when Will came home from his Mission to South Korea.

On one of our first dates after he came home, he came to my house and made me a Korean dinner. I can't remember if he brought up all the ingredients, but I do remember that Will put 7, SEVEN whole cloves of garlic in one of the dishes

Garlic = not good kissing breath! ;) Not that we kissed that night anyway...but a girl must always have her breath in mind, right?

Will still cooks Korean for us a couple times a year. My kids love it, our families love it and I love, love, love it. I like it HOT and spicy and one of my favorite dishes is Kim chi soup with tofu and pork. DElish. And the garlic is kept to a minimum although I'm sure it makes the food a little less authentic.

I never thought that I would be craving "American" food before I'd even been in Korea for a week, but I was. We had a great Korean dinner one of the first nights there, the expensive one with the taxi driver incident, we had a room-service breakfast which was very good, dinner in the hotel restaurant (cha-ching) where I tried green tea ice cream (tried one spoonful...let the rest of it melt) and on another night Will and I went underneath our hotel, which had a 5 story mall underneath it, and ate in an eatery type thing.

I have to explain how it worked so that I can remember for myself...There was a huge, long glass case with plastic, faded, very unappetizing looking food under lights and we chose what we wanted...actually, I let Will choose. We ordered at one central place and then depending on what we ordered, there were dozens of little kitchens surrounding the tables and each vendor cooked certain things. So our food was cooked by 3 different vendors and we just had to watch for our number to pop up on little boards they had over each kitchen. That night we had mondu, which is a Korean dumpling and some kind of soup. After shoving a couple of those Mondu in my mouth, I knew that I was full of Korean food. The rest of the time in Korea I was starving myself because I didn't know where to eat and what to eat. Sometimes the meat at the street vendors isn't what you think. Will laughs that Koreans put weird things together. A donut and bean paste...you think it's a jelly donut, but...it's not.

So on our first day to a city called Itaewon, we found this heavenly sight! It's a popular "military city". My friend Hillary and I were so excited! I could have eaten 6 cheeseburgers! Will and I went back to the same McD's a couple days later. It's just comforting to have foods that you're used to...ingredients and textures and things that your body starts to crave after eating squishy, bland, spicy, super-salty and not salty enough foods.

On our first full day in Korea when we were at the N Seoul Tower, we walked into a little convenience story type thing to get some water and Will came out with Milkis. Weird name, weird looking, and certainly scary to take a sip of at first, but SOOOOO good. I spent the rest of the week searching for it as we walked around! It was kind of like vanilla ice cream melted in sprite....but so good if that sounds gross to you! Then on another day, they had these little convenience stores everywhere underneath where the subway was and I found Cheetos!! Unfortunately, when I got back to the room and opened them, I didn't realize they were BBQ flavor (see that little t-bone picture on the bag?) and not even close to the Cheetos texture you expect. Blah. So I had Will go to the store on Post and get me some snacks I wanted to snack on (real American snickers and kitkat candy bars...and a BIG bottle of diet coke!).

Another very favorite Korean snack I tried was also found underground near the subway. A little lady with a portable cart was cooking these little pudding filled corn cakes, shaped like little ears of corn in the husk and everything. She also had waffle looking things but Hillary and I shared a bag of these little long-day-of-starving pieces of heaven. Again, when I was with Will, I picked up their sweet familiar scent when were underground, hunted the cart down and we shared another bag...maybe we shared it 70/30.

The last day we were in Seoul, Will wasn't sure if he had to go in for work or not so we just carried his uniform in a bag everywhere we went just in case. He ended up not having to go in for long so we had time to find a more authentic Korean restaurant that he remembered while he was in Seoul about 20 years ago.

A lot of the restaurants have their menus right outside the door so you can see if there is anything you want to eat there or not. We stayed away from the super crowded places...and normally that would be a sign to go into that particular place, but what's popular to my taste buds isn't necessarily popular to a Koreans! Just ask the squirming octopus I watched get chopped up at the hotel restaurant and the little kids at the next table laugh and giggle as the cut off octopus tentacles squirmed and stuck to their faces as they ate them.

Our meal began with this very appetizing picture as we walked up the stairs.

I guess a lot of restaurants don't serve pork! They just wanted us to be sure that's what we were eating. I was very thankful for that! The room was also filled with pictures of live pigs in pens. Two fold purpose...advertising and decoration.

So Will and I took off our shoes and literally sat down for a great lunch.

This is my favorite...Kimchi jigae

Again, the table had more little side dishes and pickled dishes on it than there was room for. Always pickled onion, whole garlic cloves, pastes and things that I would think were caramels...but they were not...and I just let them sit there and look like caramels.

When we were in Itaewon, there were carts of these big fruits. Will has told me so many times about this fruit he called a Bae...how yummy they are and that he thinks they were the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. So we bought a couple and took them back to the hotel.

It's a Asian Pear and I know this picture doesn't do it justice, but I could barely get both hands around it. It was huge! Bigger than a softball, not like the ones you see in grocery stores around here. It was so sweet and crisp and almost had a perfume aftertaste it was so sweet. One of the best parts of going to Korea was to taste one of these delicious things that I've heard Will talk about for so long. Now I get it!

We never tried any street food, except for the lady by the subway, and the streets are full of them too. But like I said, you never really know what you're getting...at least as an American you don't. Something that you think should taste sweet and ends up being 94% garlic and bean paste...I'm not that brave.

We did have an old man come up to us and hand us each, me and Hillary...we really did attract the attention of the old Korean men...nice...a little deep fried hot pocket looking thing. It was big and round and full of the translucent rice noodles and, other stuff. I have no idea what he was telling us or why he followed us to give them to us, but he seemed to very genuine in giving them to us and even took them out of the little bag to show them to us. I tried a little of it to be polite, but then we ended up carrying them around the city because we didn't know what to do with them.

One of the last nights there, and after a long day out on the town...shopping and not eating all day...I told Will I just wanted a hamburger. I think this is before Hillary and I found the McD's in Itaewon. There was a McD's in the mall underneath the hotel and Will went down to get dinner and bring it back up to the room. I was STARVING and I didn't want anything Korean, but I failed to tell Will that. He proudly came back with a Bulgogi hamburger and a super spicy chicken sandwich. Bulgogi is another Korean dish I love, just not on a hamburger and not right them. So I had a bite of the spicy chicken and had coke zero for dinner instead!

Sometimes I think there's nothing worse than being trapped somewhere, be it at home, a hotel room, a car, an airplane, a country, with no yummy snacks around. Kind of a fear of mine. Maybe that's why I travel with my own snack-stash everywhere I go...and keep one at home just in case too! You never know when you're going to need some Werther's caramels, licorice, peachy rings and bit-o-honey's! There's a special shopping trip involved with my travel snacks. Will still doesn't get it.