eunny jang

Cheng - I think you're thinking of Il Mee Buffet. Ok, this is the most imporant thing anybody will ever tell you about Korean food: Pay special attention to the gae jang panchan, and ask for it if it isn't offered. Berate your hosts if there is none to offer, then leave. Simple halved blue crabs, placed raw in chili paste, scallions, garlic and vinegar. You pick them up, the shells having become a little softer from the quick cure, and work the silky raw meat our with your teeth. Repeat until your lips are blistered from the spiciness of the chili paste and you can't take it anymore. Ohhh, man. I can't remember the name of the fantastic Korean hwe restaurant I went to once in NoVa - we had all sorts of hwe you don't see on your everyday sushi menu, big slabs of raw sea cucumber and "live" sashimi, everything wrapped at the table around slabs of raw garlic clove, slices of chili, and dressed with a dollop of daen-jang. If eating formal Japanese sushi is to revel quietly in the purity of the flavors and in the skill and artistry of the execution, sitting down to a platter of Korean hwe is to undergo an almost assaultive hit to the senses. Although most Korean food north of the Potomac is pretty mundane, Woomi Garden in Wheaton is pretty good - as per usual in Korean restaurants, steer clear of the sushi and Japanese entrees, and focus on the hotpots, noodles, and barbeque. Their galbi jjim (braised short ribs), any of their dolsot bibimbap dishes (including ahl dolsot bibimbap, where the primary garnish is flying fish roe), and spicy pork barbeque are especially good versions. There's also a great, very cheap soondae restaurant next to Korean Korner in Twinbrook - the restaurant serves almost nothing but soondae, sort of a Korean boudin noir but with lots of rice or vermicelli in the filling. You can order it simply boiled and sliced, or in a murky, livery soup...you get the idea. Sometimes, it's the only thing that will do.

The spread of little pickle and salad dishes is collectively called panchan. They're not appetizers, although they sometimes appear before the main, and they're not condiments or palate cleansers either - it's hard to describe exactly how they fit into a meal. I tend to think of them a spread of many different side dishes (although you only take a taste of each from time to time) to accompany whatever you're eating and to help round out the balance of key flavors on the table (hot, sour, salty, sweet, etc). When money was getting tight in our house when I was growing up, dinner would often be just a bowl of rice and assorted panchan. Breakfast was always rice and panchan.

a brownie. Dreaming of fried-chicken skin. Thinking about going to Popeyes and just eating the skin, but feel guilty about the waste.

Oh no, I'm usually surprised that Tom's not nastier when he's called upon to defend himself and his opinions to a bunch of people who seem to regard anonymity as an excuse to be rude. I was just commenting that the chat has gotten rather rowdy lately (not that I mind - I much prefer his spirited chat over, say, Kim O'Donnel's love-and-empowerment fest).

See Tom type See Tom chat See Tom rage 'bout a quarter down the page.

Went to my parent's house for my mom's birthday and ate, among other things: galbi jjim (big hunky short ribs long-cooked with soy, mirin, garlic, etc), jap chae (cellophane noodles with meat and veggies), many different panchan, mandoo guk (for lack of a better description, wonton soup), gorgeous little fritters of shredded beef tossed in cornstarch and flour, then battered very lightly and deep-fried. Our family's typical fresh kimchi/salad: greens and long ribbon-cut scallions dressed with chili flakes, rice vinegar, and sesame oil. Put together by my grandmother and aunt. Then, went to my boyfriend's house to ogle the array of new Calphalon he acquired yesterday. Ate again: really good little pork medallions, just salted and peppered; big green salad; some middle eastern rice mix from a box, the seasoning packet of which he threw away in favor of butter, salt and pepper. Was really pretty good, with the exception of the strange, gummy little "pine nuts" already in the rice.

Jinmyo, what is fruilano cheese? Sad to say, my knowledge of good cheese is more or less nonexistant.

OH! I love fresh sage - it is so phenomenally different from the dried product, or anything most people are accustomed to as a "sage" flavor in stuffing etc, and it undergoes such an interesting transformation when cooked in fat. Take the softer, more velvety leaves and heat them in a mix of olive oil and butter. Turn them once until they are brown and smell delicious, and you have the most incredible little crackly chips. I could eat these with salt by the handful, but a more judicious use would be to toss them with the sagey butter/oil, hot pasta, lots of pepper, salt, and some parmigiano. Tiny little bursts of intense flavor. Or wrap slivers of garlic with the tiniest leaves, and stud a pork loin with them before roasting... Judy Rogers has a recipe for a fresh sage pesto in the Zuni Cafe book, but I love a rougher version - just mill sage with some olive oil, heat just to take the edge off, add salt, pepper, cheese if you want...brush on meat, toss with pasta, eat with breakfast cereal, etc... Make all-cheese crisps with lots of sage... Does anyone know if sage does well in pots on a windowsill?

Planned for quick chili and bacon cornbread with cheddar and scallions. Of course, I got sidetracked at work, then at the grocery store while trying to fill a prescription, then on the drive home (stupid GW Parkway!). Started chopping onions and bacon at 9pm. Seared little chunky cubes of chuck in hot hot hot olive oil, removed and tossed in salt, pepper, cumin, paprika, cayenne, oregano - where the hell was the oregano? I knew I had oregano. I had SEEN the oregano in my cabinet that morning when I went for the box of Earl Grey. Extended, fruitless search for oregano. Long-suffering, hungry boyfriend sent on mission for oregano. Meanwhile, sauteed onions and garlic in the fat in the pot. Deglazed with beef stock and a big can of tomatoes, somewhat violently crushed as though they were at fault for the mysteriously dissapearing herbs. Started cooking the bacon and sifting together dry ingredients for the cornbread. Thinking myself oh-so-clever for not dirtying another pan, I put the pyrex baking dish over a burner, added oil and the chopped bacon, and went about cooking-lull cleanup, thinking I'd cook the bacon and get the pan preheated and greased all at once. Chopped scallions and cubed some triple-sharp cheddar. Was reaching for the baking powder when there was a sort of muffled BOOM, but very loud and accompanied by the tinkle of glass raining down on stone counters. Extended break from cooking to clean up the gawd-awful mess and inspect all surfaces for glass. Congratulated myself for having just put the cover on the chili. Boyfriend returned with oregano just as I got back from the trash chute. Cornbread went into another pan, oven door shut rather forcefully behind it. Sour cream in a dish, more cheddar, cilantro, onions minced and arranged on a pretty glass plate. Chili spooned over unexpectedly delicious cornbread. Big kiss from boyfriend: "Thanks for making dinner; you make it look so easy." Polished off my glass of wine, lit a cigarette, thought about seconds.

Utz salt & pepper potato chips. Finishing off the second fill-up of my 1.5l water bottle.

Fully intended to make old-school Americanized spaghetti and meatballs for consumption while watching the Sopranos, but discovered at 8:00pm that - would you believe it - the weather was no less shitty than it had been an hour before that, and the hour before that. Gave up on the idea of hiking down to Safeway. Ordered from Mr. Chen's instead and ate General Tso's Tofu (good), Crispy Beef (ok), Kung Pao Chicken (blech) and their Peking Duck Rolls (didn't even want to share). Subsequently kept awake by mysterious, vaguely ominous fortune: "You will pass a very difficult test."

Cheetos. One of the five major food groups.

pcarpen: all your food is so beautiful and well-conceived, it makes me hungry just to look at the photos. Last shoestring-budget dinner (although I'm trying to get better about budgeting etc). Visited the little bodega-ish store on 17th Street. Bought a bag of dried split peas and a bony, smoked-till-it-looked-like-jerky ham hock to the tune of $1.97 including tax. Walked two blocks home, pissed off that rather than having soup waiting for me when I got out of the rain, I'd have to spend an hour making it. Onions, one sad-looking carrot, and the jerky-ham cooked in rendered bacon fat. Peas, water. Ham removed, shredded, returned to pot. Lots and lots of cracked black pepper. Tiny bit of salt. Dragged my boyfriend out in the cold rain with me for a cigarette run right before we were ready to eat. Came back in, shivering and chilled and wet. Soup was subsequently the best goddamn bowl of soup ever.

What was your family food culture when you were growing up? My parents are first-generation Korean immigrants. I was born about a year after they came over - they hadn't had much time to acclimate before they had to deal with how to raise me and my sister. Money was verrry tight until I was a teen and they became (moderately) successful small-business owners. We ate very Korean, mostly downscale foods. All my mom's food shopping was done exclusively at Korean grocery stores. There's a very strong Korean community in the DC area - even when I was little (20 years ago), the Korean groceries were well-stocked and modern. Trips to Safeways and Giants were rare adventures full of mysterious, wonderful things like lunch meat and cheese. My dad was something of a country boy from a farming background and my mom was a city girl from Busan, but she ended up cooking a lot of the super-spicy, super-garlicky country foods my dad liked. At most meals, we had slivered cloves of raw garlic and raw sliced green chiles on the table as a vegetable panchan (Koreans serve lots of little dishes, marinated salads, kimchees, various little meat and fish plates, on the table along with the main meal. Collectively, they are called panchan. A light meal might be composed of nothing but a bowl of rice and 3 or 4 panchan). We ate a lot of cheap fish, less-desirable chicken parts and vegetables, lots of rice and tofu, and very little meat. We never ate American food except at school or when we were visiting friends. I don't think we even had forks in the house until I was 8 or 9. Discovering food didn't really happen for me until I got a part-time job and could eat out wherever I wanted to. I started cooking then, too - and helped my parents discover that they love robustly-flavored ethnic foods (Italian, Mexican, Indian). Also, after their garlic-vinegar-chili-heavy diets, they deride most American food as bland and flavorless Was meal time important? Very. My dad worked a day shift as a mechanic when I was a kid, would come home at 6, we'd eat dinner, and he'd go to sleep for a couple hours before he headed out at midnight to work another shift debugging/monitoring computers on the subway. Dinner every night, plus Sunday, was the only time we all saw one another. Was cooking important? My mom was constantly cooking. When I was very little, she'd make a year's supply of her own kimchee each fall - tons of people would come over, the men would go on the deck with beers and cigarettes, the women would put great big glass jars of kimchee up, and us kids would run around, delighted at all the activity and making a huge mess. My mom had ten ten-gallon metal bowls to do all the salting down and mixing in. What were the penalties for putting elbows on the table? None. You'd get a swat for interrupting a grown-up though, or for sloppy eating. Who cooked in the family? Mom. Were restaurant meals common, or for special occassions? Very, very rare special occasions. Sushi mostly. I was already 13 or 14 by the time we went to a really nice meal out at an American-style restaurant. I remember my mom hated it; she thought the waiters were too nosy. Did children have a "kiddy table" when guests were over? Always. I remember the year I was so excited to be the most grown up at the little table and the boss of everything - then the subsequent year, when I "graduated," being mortified to be the baby at the adults table. When did you get that first sip of wine? My dad has always let me have tastes of whatever was on the table since I can remember. Was there a pre-meal prayer? No, unless grandparents were around. When I was a kid, my grandfather's prayers were so long and full of fire-and-brimstone that I thought people only prayed before meals so everyone would lose their appetite and they'd save money. Was there a rotating menu (e.g., meatloaf every Thursday)? Nope, although we could tell when money was running short - we'd have soup flavored with only meatless bones for dinner, along with rice steamed with beans to stretch it. How much of your family culture is being replicated in your present-day family life? Well, I don't exactly have a family life of my own yet. I hardly ever eat Korean food now, though I crave certain things very badly a few times a year. I'm an economical cook like my mom was, though - never frivolous about wasting food or making a bad purchase. I do feel, very strongly, that good food cooked with care and concern for those who will consume it is one of the central means to having a happy house - when my friends come over for dinner, I want them to feel like they did when we were kids eating supper with the family, small and happy and sated and unworried, concious that everyone at the table is too.

Though this isn't my topic, I'll be glad to take advantage of the wisdom this group can give to Jennot Jenn! I live in a 500sf (with an inexplicably large walk-in closet; I wish they'd just made it a foot larger on all sides and I could use it as a bedroom) studio, and am faced with a couple problems when it comes to deep frying. 1) My kitchen is sleek and new and pretty, but small. I don't really have a problem with its footprint since I don't have many appliances to clutter things up and the layout is pretty thoughtful, providing plenty of prep surfaces and a sensible flow but everything in it is small. My gas stove is a mini version of the real thing (picture an oven just big enough to properly roast one 3lb chicken and a pan of vegetables on the rack below. A 9x13 lasagna takes up a whole rack), and my burners are very close together. They seem to provide decent power though (big flames, anyway). Is it possible to fry in very small batches in a small amount of oil in a small-ish (3qt?) saucepan? I worry that temperatures would fluctuate too much in such a small amout of oil, even if i was frying, say, three shrimp at a time. 2) Although the place is layed out pretty well, a studio's a studio, and deep frying now would mean going to sleep in a cloud of oil. I have no ventilation system to speak of, but I do have a window in my kitchen very near the stove as well as a larger one further along the wall. Would a fan in the window suffice? Or is this a lost cause altogether.

zero-balance checking account dinner: Thin-sliced onions cooked long and dry (I'd call it onion confit, but there was no lipid in the pot until the onions were already brown and limp and caramel-y). Generous amounts of olive oil added when the onions stopped giving up liquid. Lots of Parmigiano, cracked black pepper more olive oil and some salt. Bucatini. As Mark Bittman promised, the onions were almost overly sweet - needed lots and lots of cheese and pepper to keep it from being overwhelming. Delicious, though.

Catfish sandwich. Lots of Hellman's with capers, parsley and pickles.

I am broke as all hell due due to a quickie impulse purchase. The only problem is, the item in question was a new sofa. Therefore, this week is the week of cheap, cheap eating. Unfortunately, I moved into this apartment only a month or so ago, so my pantry hasn't been built to normal stocking levels. Dinner last night was some frozen halibut I had, roasted in big chunks with finely milled garlic, parsley, rosemary, salt/pepper. Onions in the roasting pan, oil-toasted breadcrumbs/rest of the herb stuff sprinkled over at table. Diced potatoes parboiled and then crisped in olive oil and more rosemary. Nothing green. The Safeway on 17th Street, visible from my apartment, taunts me. I'm thinking there will be a lot of legumes and a lot of pasta until Friday.

They have a guy at the door at 11am? Or was that at the bar? I just want to get in the door - I could care less about having a drink. There are legitimate, non-sketchy reasons I ask (although it's only peripherally food-related, I suppose); I'm not a snotnosed suburban kid trying to act cool for a big weekend out.

Speaking of Fado...does anyone here know approximately when they start carding? And do they kick out non-21s once they do start?

You don't sound like you've traveled abroad much. I think that getting a proper breakfast like this abroad would be a rare and wondrous thing. Ohh...all I meant was that I order this at every crappy diner I've been to on a regular Saturday morning bumming around town. You're right, I haven't traveled abroad much, but when I have, breakfast has always been whatever dairy/pastry-type things the hotel sets out (with much wonderment over how different dairy is outside the US), or when in Korea visiting family, rice and pan chan and soup. Miyuk-guk might be the most restorative breakfast in the world.

Little burgers with Jack cheese, bacon and scallions stuffed inside to compensate for being cooked to medium-well, eaten on toasted buttered onion buns with arugula and lots of raw white onion. Oven sweet potato fries with chili flakes, garlic, rosemary and olive oil. I would have liked to try deep-frying them, but I live in a studio and didn't feel like going to sleep in a cloud of oil...short of purchasing a deep fryer, does anyone have ideas on good ideas for setting up a decent ventilation system? I do have a window in my kitchen, but no exhaust system to speak of.

This strikes me as a good new person topic, so... I eat the exact same breakfast everywhere I go: Two eggs, over easy, hopefully cooked in butter with crackly edges on the whites, sprinkled with Tabasco. Buttered white toast dipped in the yolks. Home fries with onions, or hash browns without, also with Tabasco. Two links of thick, mild pork sausage with maple syrup. Always, always corned beef hash cooked really crisp and liberally dressed with maple syrup and more Tabasco. Everything looks disgusting once I've condiment-ed it to my taste, but it's so good. I eat this almost every weekend, and have eaten at least components of it since I was very small. Coffee and tomato juice. Breakfast is my favorite meal to eat out of the house.

Dinner just for me at 11:00pm after happy hour with long-lost girlfriends. My favorite late-night sandwich: piles of shaved white onion on white sandwich bread. Cracked pepper, salt, flat-leaf parsley, Hellman's. The Washington Post and a big whiskey sour. Cigarettes.

Unabashadly 1950's style Italian night for the return of the Sopranos: Pounded chicken breasts dredged in a bound breading with equal parts breadcrumbs and Parmigiano in the final step with lemon zest stirred in; crisped in oil and butter, covered with a dollop of super-quick canned-tomatoes-with-squashed-more-than-chopped-onions-and-garlic sauce and an embarrassment of decent mozzeralla and more Parmigiano. Broiled till cheese bubbled and got delicious-looking. Plain old linguini with terrible tasteless olive oil that might have well have been greasy water, parsley and garlic, with more of the aforementioned sauce. Rough chopped plain arugula piled atop to stir into the hot pasta and sauce at table till wilted. Garlic bread. Eaten with silver and linen, but crouched around the coffee table. (First post. I love all food, but at home tend to cook very simple things and just take pleasure in executing them really well. Still learning: only just recently bought my very first pan that isn't coated with non-stick stuff).