eG Foodblog: Domestic Goddess - Adobo & Fried Chicken in Korea

[lumiere]

Lumiere - aaah, you just named my waterloo - Leche Flan. I can never make this Filipino dessert (my brother and my mom makes leche flan that makes my hubby wanna cry). I have tried several times to make this luscious egg custard but failed miserably everytime. 

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IMHO I make a good one.

My mum used to make a lot of those during her pre-marriage days, so her siblings always used it as a benchmark against which anyone's leche flan was compared. My grandmother (bless her soul) made a good one as she learned form my mum. Now, here I am in Sydney, brave enough to attempt my mum's method. Sure enough it did not disappoint. Everyone said it tasted and looked exactly like my mum's.

I'll email you the recipe.

[Domestic Goddess]

Btw Domestic Goddess are Korean spa's still a normal part of life there? Ours has a restaurant so you just spend the whole day there and have lunch whenever you want (in your robe and barefeet!)

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Yes they are!!! Oh boy they are. A friend took 2 years to convince me to go to one. I have, um modesty issues. In the korean public baths/spa, everyone is nekkid. I can never do that, until that fateful day when my friend kidnapped me and had me go through the experience. After few moments of extreme embarassment, I actually enjoyed it.

There were different pools to soak in. Hot one, warm one, cold one, a tea pool and even a wine pool, can you believe that? There are old ladies there who you can pay $10 to scrub all over your body for about 30 minutes. I never felt cleaner in my entire life. My skin looked as pink as a baby's bottom. I also tasted tea eggs, soy eggs and iced green tea there for a light snack. And yes, we ate with our bathrobes on.

Lumiere - aaah, you just named my waterloo - Leche Flan. I can never make this Filipino dessert (my brother and my mom makes leche flan that makes my hubby wanna cry). I have tried several times to make this luscious egg custard but failed miserably everytime. 

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IMHO I make a good one.

I'll email you the recipe.

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Thanks Lumiere! I can't wait for it!

[Dejah]

Any chance we could see your first published poem? I'm sure it is on topic as you wrote it at your Mom's burger stall.

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Dejah - here's the actual page where I wrote it 29 years ago. Yes, I still have the notebook.

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Thank you, Doddie. That's excellent.

[hzrt8w]

Seriously, what *is* Maggie Seasoning and what makes it soooo addictive?

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MSG.

Seriously, Maggi is a brand of soup cubes and granules and instant noodles--in southeast Asia, it's a joke that when a student moves overseas to study, they bring these in their bag with them.

Not sure which seasoning in particular they've been referring to though.

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I think the Maggi Gastro888 is talking about is the sauce in a smallish bottle, soy-ish but not quite

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And MSG just the same.

[Pan]

[...]Salted fish hang by their yellow ties, waiting to be bought. These fish bundles are favorite gifts during Chuseok (Thanksgiving) and can cost up to $30 per bundle. 

[...]

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That's astonishing! Why is salted fish so expensive in Korea? Is that an answerable question? Does it cost more than fresh fish?

Sorry about the asthma, and I hope that doesn't recur.

I liked the poem.

[Domestic Goddess]

This is what it looks like out of our window today.

Yep. It is raining and it is soooo cold. Perfect weather for Pochero (heads up Rebecca263! )

I took my trusty pot and browned some garlic, onions and the beef chunks.

When everything is brown and ready, fill the pot 2/3 full and bring to a boil. Remove the scum the rises on top. Do thing everytime and you'll end up with clear and cleaner tasting soup.

When the meat is tender, add your veggies according to hardness, carrots first, then potatoes, yard beans then squash after that all the leafy veggies (leeks, bok choy, cabbage).

Here is what my bowl looks like before adding the broth.

To make the spicy eggplant salad to accompany the pochero stew, first boil 2 eggplants in a small pot of water until tender. Peel the eggplants and add a couple of cooked squash squares (from the pochero stew). Mash the eggplant and squash together.

Add 2-3 tablespoons of vinegar to the mashed eggplant, and 1-2 tsps of finely minced garlic (vary amount to the degree of spiciness that you want). Salt and pepper and mix thoroughly. Serve salad beside the stew.

Here is my hearty lunch. Pochero stew with Eggplant salad on the side.

Excuse me while I take a nap now.

Edited March 10, 2007 by Domestic Goddess (log)

[andiesenji]

Doddie, your blog is just stupendous. Not only are you a writer, in my opinion you are now a photojournalist too.

The photos of the local scenery are great but the food photos are simply wonderful. It is certainly understandable why everyone reading your blog has referred to sallivating, appetite, hunger, in just about every post.

It even makes me wish I could visit Korea.

I am just wondering what you will produce next.

Edited March 10, 2007 by andiesenji (log)

[Domestic Goddess]

That's astonishing! Why is salted fish so expensive in Korea? Is that an answerable question? Does it cost more than fresh fish?

Sorry about the asthma, and I hope that doesn't recur.

I liked the poem.

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Pan - I really don't know why that particular salted fish is so expensive. I asked my korean friends about it and no one can give me a straight answer. Maybe Sheena knows the answer?

I'm glad you and Dejah like my poem, too.

Andie - thank you for your kind words. I am so glad you viewed my blog and liked it. I feel so honored that you find it wonderful. You are the reason why I am here in eGullet. Thank you again for inviting me here.

[andiesenji]

I have been following it during the past few days but every time I started to post an answer, another of your posts with the great photos would pop up and I just had to read that one and study the pictures in detail.

As far as I am concerned this is a true art form.

[mizducky]

I too have been quiet simply because I was too busy reading and enjoying to stop and write. Um, and work was also kind of interfering. But now that I've made it to the weekend, I can take a little time to say "bravo!" And that, yeah, I've been drooling too.

I'm majorly grateful for this window into everyday Korean and Filipino food and culture you're giving us. Not to mention the style and thoroughness with which you're doing it.

A few days ago, your blog inspired me to take a whack at making a kong namul type dish. I don't know enough to say how far from authentic my version was, but I had a bunch of fun.

P.S. Love your childhood poem. That's so fabulous that you still have the original. I was a grade school poet too. Alas, the little diary I used to write in disappeared long ago.

[Rebecca263]

Esteemed Domestic Goddess,(aka Doddie)-

POCHERO!!!! I'm so glad to see your version! I just KNEW that there was someother vegetable mixed in with the eggplant. I could never figure it out.

I could live on that stuff! I haven't had a bite of it in over 20 years. How sad, it turns out to be something I can tackle at home, too! I like to dip the meat and root vegetables in mustard. Does that sound weird? I want to make that now. You make everything seem so doable... how do you do that? I think that is one of your most charming attributes. THANK YOU!

[nakji]

I think the salted fish can be so expensive because they can come from a certain region that's famous for making that kind of fish - so it's a "limited edition" kind of thing, and used as a prestige gift, a lot like they do in Japan with those $100 melons. Whether the quality is any better or not, I can't comment.

[Domestic Goddess]

I had a great nap today (thanks to Darling Hubby keeping the boys at bay - busy and occupied on our computers). Tonight's supper is usually a Filipino breakfast - Longganisa with Garlic Fried Rice and Salted Egg salad.

Making the Salted Egg salad. Take one salted egg, about 1/4 of an onion and 4 cherry tomatoes. Dice the onion and quarter the tomatoes. Mince the salted egg. Mix everything in a bowl thoroughly.

Pile up on a serving plate and serve with the Longganisa & Fried Rice.

Longganisa with Fried Rice

And for dessert - Chocolate Banana Muffins baked before I took the nap.

[Domestic Goddess]

For the sweettooths in here. Korean ice cream bars and cones.

Cookies and cream ice cream bar.

Googoo cone - chocolate with nuts and caramel cone.

Like what the name on the package said - Choco Fudge bar.

Hubby's favorite - Ice cream sandwich (chocolate sandwich cookie with vanila ice cream filling).

This cone is pure chocolate with chunks of chocolate - a chocoholic's dream cone.

And lastly, a great ice cream bar with a chocolate fudge center, vanilla ice cream coating and then crispy rice chocolate shell.

[miladyinsanity]

Lumiere - aaah, you just named my waterloo - Leche Flan. I can never make this Filipino dessert (my brother and my mom makes leche flan that makes my hubby wanna cry). I have tried several times to make this luscious egg custard but failed miserably everytime. 

←

IMHO I make a good one.

My mum used to make a lot of those during her pre-marriage days, so her siblings always used it as a benchmark against which anyone's leche flan was compared. My grandmother (bless her soul) made a good one as she learned form my mum. Now, here I am in Sydney, brave enough to attempt my mum's method. Sure enough it did not disappoint. Everyone said it tasted and looked exactly like my mum's.

I'll email you the recipe.

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Lumiere, is it a family recipe? Can you post it in RecipeGullet please? I'd love to see it too.

[ChryZ]

I'm kinda late to the party and read this wonderful blog in the last two days.

Doddie, thank you for all the effort.

[sazji]

I just emerged from 2 weeks of work-monkery to check into egullet; what a nice surprise to see your blog! It's nice to have a better idea of who you are and what everyday life is like there. (And to see where that very interesting Korean candy came from, and where the lokum went!) All those tables full of banchan and kimchi and rice cakes and...

I'm struck by occasional similarities to Turkey in the architecture - the particular style of cement tower - your town looks like lots of Anatolian towns. Are there still neighborhoods with traditional houses? I realize I have absolutely no idea what a traditional Korean home looks like.

Also the love of grilled meats, the street markets. (Except that ours are almost never so open and easy to walk through/take pictures of!).

Can you take some close up shots of these "mountain herbs" that show up a lot? I mean in their fresh state. I'd love to have some idea what they actually are.

Thanks for a great blog!

[MarketStEl]

I'm catching up after two days offline, learning new tricks for my trade and enjoying the atmosphere--and the food--at a luxury resort hotel in "The Sweetest Place on Earth." (I've posted photos of the last day's lunch over on the "Lunch!" topic in the Cooking forum.)

I must say that I am enjoying the sightseeing as much as I am the food. Since much of what follows will pertain to the former and is OT for anything but a foodblog, I will start with comments on the food first.

I notice that you rely on very fresh ingredients for everything you cook, and that your use of convenience products is limited to flavorings and seasonings. Is this the norm for most Koreans still? Is this a "luxury you can afford" due to lack of competing pressures on your time? Do you make the time to cook properly regardless what else you do? Or are these dishes just easy to prepare? (Most of them look it.)

Now, on to the architecture and other stuff -- but please note the comment at the end of this post.

Restaurant architecture in Korea looks a lot more varied than its US counterpart does. I don't recall seeing too many artificial grottoes like the one below over here:

This is one of our favorite korean restaurants - Bawoo Galbi Restaurant. Hubby teaches the owner's kids in his institute/hagwon. The restaurant's Kalbi Tang soup and samgyeopsal are really tasty.

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and with the exception of certain fast-food seafood chains, tricked-up Cape Cod houses usually house banks, not tofu palaces, in the US. (And no self-respecting bank would be caught dead with this much fluorescent signage on its exterior.) Love that rock roadside sign, BTW. Are naturalistic stone treatments a common architectural element in Korea?

Let's go back to food shall we? Today's lunch was at the Kong-Guel Restaurant. "Kong-guel" means bean village in korean, meaning that a lot of beans and legumes are grown here. Kong-Guel restaurant's specialty is tofu and almost all of the listed dishes in the menu are tofu-based or is made with some kind of tofu.

Here is the street sign saying Kong-Guel.

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A note for MarketSt - In South Korea, even in small country towns, most development is of the large apartment complex kind. Of course, this makes sense in the city, where there is a lot of pressure on land-use. However, here is very little modern single-family housing in the countryside, where there is a lot of room for it. People say they prefer to live in the apartment complexes because they're more modern and convenient. Most houses in Korea date from the early eighties and haven't aged well. Ilsan, a developer-planned city, pictured above, has some duplexes and single family dwellings, complete with suburban sidewalks. When my friend and I got homesick, we would walk around it and pretend to be back in Canada (New Zealand for her). It was really weird to take a train to a small country town, with acres of mountains, farm fields, and forest around it, and see three or four giant apartment complexes clustered around one small main street. Interestingly, this trend of everyone living in small (by North American standards) apartments has led to the spawning of several kinds of businesses that we don't have in North America, because we have family rooms. For example, instead of having friends over to play internet games together, kids probably go to an internet room, where each of them can have a computer for a dollar an hour. Instead of young couples making out on their parents' house in the basement, they rent a DVD room, which has a big-screen TV, a DVD player, and a sofa. Karaoke? Go to a singing room. Want a hot tub and sauna? Go to the public bath house. I didn't mind living in a small apartment in Korea, because so many services were available to me in the public domain.

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Thanks for the explanation, nakji.

It appears to me, based on an admittedly small sample size, that some Korean emigres have brought that style of entertainment over to the States with them. Somewhere on the Pennsylvania board is a chronicle of a fabulous Korean pig-out that KatieLoeb, Greg Ling, the head chef at Django, a couple of other people whose names escape me now and I had at a Korean restaurant in a strip mall in Olney, followed by a round of singing in one of the restaurant's karaoke rooms (no karaoke photos, sorry!). Karaoke in American bars/restaurants is usually not a quasi-private, family-room-style affair; if it's that experience one wants, one usually has a living room or family room in which to have it.

I also love the "urban planning" notion of small clustered dwellings

surrounded by large open spaces, with lots of shared amenities in

the public space; opposed to the sprawl model with huge homes with

everything inside them (and people whine about heating/ aircon bills;

and having to drive everywhere and get stuck in traffic jams....)

(I wonder the score differences between the former and latter

dwellings on www.footprint.org).....

Milagai

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I think it would help create a sense of community too, because you'd get to know your neighbors. Its so easy to cozy up at home and never get out into the world, and here, people are doing that more and more. Apparently a new trend in high-end remodels is to put a mini-fridge and coffee maker in the master bathroom. I guess that way one doesnt even have to face the kids and pets in the morning. (Not to say that its a fantasy I couldnt buy into .... )

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Here's something funny for you, Kouign: You could hardly find someone who is more urban than I. I live in an apartment building and do a fair bit of socializing outside it in neighborhood clubs or at other activities. However, the people I know best and socialize with most are not my neighbors -- I am acquainted with only two of the roughly 20 other people who live on my floor and know most of the rest only by sight. In my entire building (90 apartments housing roughly 160 people), I am acquainted with only four other neighbors, three of whom I know because I met them in another setting outside the building. (One of those three met me because he came up to me in a nearby bar and mentioned that I never seemed to say hello to him. ) Rather, my main social circle consists of people who live elsewhere in town -- in many cases outside my neighborhood -- and come to some common "third place" like a bar or clubhouse to socialize and entertain one another.

I'd say more on this, but this is a foodblog, not an urbanism forum. PM me if you're curious to hear more.

Any chance we could see your first published poem? I'm sure it is on topic as you wrote it at your Mom's burger stall.

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Dejah - here's the actual page where I wrote it 29 years ago. Yes, I still have the notebook.

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You had a great deal of talent at a very early age -- that teacher was right to encourage you. Your career path as a writer in some ways parallels mine. I guess not all of us were destined to write the Great [Fill-In-The-Blank] Novel or Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism or literature. That doesn't mean we aren't happy in our work. I know I am, and it looks to me like you are (were?) too.

(Confidential to mizducky: Somewhere in a file cabinet drawer around this house, I still have the Adams B-41 Comment Book, including a rather arch comment you made after a classmate of mine came up from Princeton to visit me over a weekend and managed to rub you and most of my roommates the wrong way.)

Now for the comment: This blog is almost at an end, and the only fridge we've seen so far is one in a restaurant that held beverages. I realize that you've given us a wealth of visual and literary delights on this blog, but some traditions must be upheld. I've shown you mine, now you show me yours.

[Catew]

She did! She did! And it was very impressive too (her freezer organization is amazing). Thanks for the great blog, Doddie!

Look here:

http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showto...dpost&p=1372365

Now for the comment:  This blog is almost at an end, and the only fridge we've seen so far is one in a restaurant that held beverages.  I realize that you've given us a wealth of visual and literary delights on this blog, but some traditions must be upheld.  I've shown you mine, now you show me yours. 

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Edited March 10, 2007 by Catew (log)

[andiesenji]

I'm catching up after two days offline, learning new tricks for my trade and enjoying the atmosphere--and the food--at a luxury resort hotel in "The Sweetest Place on Earth."  (I've posted photos of the last day's lunch over on the "Lunch!" topic in the Cooking forum.)

I must say that I am enjoying the sightseeing as much as I am the food.  Since much of what follows will pertain to the former and is OT for anything but a foodblog, I will start with comments on the food first.

(snip)

Now for the comment:  This blog is almost at an end, and the only fridge we've seen so far is one in a restaurant that held beverages.  I realize that you've given us a wealth of visual and literary delights on this blog, but some traditions must be upheld.  I've shown you mine, now you show me yours. 

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I saw a fridge and a well-packed and well-organized freezer in one of the earliest posts.

[MarketStEl]

She did!  She did!  And it was very impressive too (her freezer organization is amazing).  Thanks for the great blog, Doddie!

Look here:

http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showto...dpost&p=1372365

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Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Pass the wet ramen noodle, please.

I must still be semi-senile from a massive chocolate overdose.

[hzrt8w]

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How interesting! Does your salted egg taste about the same as the Chinese salted egg or very different? Is it traditional to have the dark pink color? (I assume this is from some kind of food dye. I haven't seen pictures of a naturally pink egg before.)

[Domestic Goddess]

I notice that you rely on very fresh ingredients for everything you cook, and that your use of convenience products is limited to flavorings and seasonings. Is this the norm for most Koreans still? Is this a "luxury you can afford" due to lack of competing pressures on your time? Do you make the time to cook properly regardless what else you do? Or are these dishes just easy to prepare? (Most of them look it.)

Sandy - koreans are very particular in getting the freshest ingredients for their cooking/food. Somehow, it has rubbed on me too. That doesn't mean that I turn my nose up at the reject/old-produce-but-still-ok bin. Since I'm a stay home-mom I can afford to go to the market/grocery store everyday and YES, I make time to cook the different food properly (or the voice of my grandmother in my head berating me for not doing it right will bug me to know end).

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How interesting! Does your salted egg taste about the same as the Chinese salted egg or very different? Is it traditional to have the dark pink color? (I assume this is from some kind of food dye. I haven't seen pictures of a naturally pink egg before.)

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Ah Leung, Filipino salted eggs taste the same as Chinese salted eggs. The reason for the pink dye is to distinguish it from the normal fresh eggs. It doesn't add anything else (re: taste) except that garish pink color. LOL

[Domestic Goddess]

Korean architecture for Sandy and Sazji.

A Korean traditional house.

Here's a house with Chinese influence.

A Menhir stone found in a ricefield near our apartment buildings.

Billy on top of a stone turtle (the base of a stone sign).

[Domestic Goddess]

Sunday! And it's hotdogs for breakfast!