Home Sweet Home
Yes, I now live in the third largest city in the world (by population), following Tokyo and Mexico City. This city is ginormous but it is nearly impossible to get totally lost in it. If you are confused, hold up a map and look around quizically. Within a few minutes a nice Korean person will stop and offer you help. If you don't want to bother the nice people, all you have to do is look for a subway station, and the place is littered with them like China was with garbage and shit. From the subway, you can always find your way home.
My new home is in a place called Daechong Tower, which has 26 floors, a subway station in the basement, two convenience stores, a cafe that only has one table, a gym that has a golf area, a quilting store, a dentist, a dermatologist, a bar, a bakery and a floor of restaurants that smells unappetizingly like fish. My apartment is a studio with a murphy bed (that means that it can fold up into the wall if I want more space) and a bathroom the size of a very small closet. I also have a small gas range with a little drawer of an oven. Ovens are almost non-existent in Asia. We made cookies in our guesthouse and the owner looked at the oven with shock, like she hadn't known that you could cook things in it. Since we like to make cookies, we tried to do this in my oven the other night, but something went wrong. I am not sure how, but the cookies caught on fire. I went to check on them and found them in flames. It literally took about 15 minutes to get them to go out. So there you go, flaming cookies in a mini-oven. Lesson learned: don't try to cook in the "oven" because that is not what it is meant for. I don't know what it is meant for, but obviously it's not for making cookies.
1 comment:
Hi Little Sister,
Hey, you dope! That is a little fish broiler! Actually, I suppose that it is technically just a broiler, but my host mom broiled fish in one nearly every night, so I think of it in that way.
If you want to make something yummy and easy in your broiler, you can make yaki-onigiri -- grilled rice balls. Here is a link to all of the onigiri recipes on one of my favorite Japanese food blogs:
http://justhungry.com/onigiri
The recipe for yaki-onigiri is in the second post. Just be sure you make the rice balls nice and tight from hot rice (though if you press it too much it might turn mushy and gross), and leave off the nori. I don't remember ever putting a filling in the yaki-onigiri, just the regular ones.
You could also grill fish, eggplant, and lots of other yummy things in your mini-broiler. They usually have a little removable tray underneath to collect fish juices, etc. after you're done cooking.
Have you bought a English-language Korean cookbook yet? I bet you'll get tired of cooking the few American dishes whose ingredients are readily available pretty soon.
Your apartment is so, so cute!
Love,
Em
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