Explore Culinary Asia

I just couldn’t resist this metal chopsticks thing.   When we first encountered them, there were some puzzled looks around the table.  Our host, Maureen O’Crowley, said they were originally used by royalty to test for poisoning.  Apparently they change color in the presence of the deadly stuff.

And then I found other stories on the net that the metal ones were used after World War II because there was no wood left, but there was an abundance of scrap metal!  And even better is the theory that Koreans use the flat metal chopsticks because they could be weapons.  So think about it before you insult someone over dinner!  The caveat here is that I don’t know if all these stories are true, but it doesn’t keep them from being intriguing.

I bought a pair of the Korean chopsticks and one of the long elegant soup spoons (very nice!).   I’ve been carrying a set of utensils including chopsticks around Asia for  a couple of decades.  It’s safer in backwater places to bring your own cutlery and it’s environmentally more conscious.   Mountains of the wooden kind are thrown away every year.

And now, dear readers, I promise to move onto other locales, but Korea remains high on my list and will be the center piece of some future posts.

This just in from Geun-mi Kwon, our Korean guide

We also have a sort of Halloween day in Korea, but it is rarely known, the day after Dae-bo-reum (literally “Great Full Moon”) which is also a Korean holiday that celebrates the first full moon of the new year of the lunar Korean calendar.  One familiar custom is to crack nuts with one’s teeth.  It is believed that this practice will help keep one’s teeth health for the year, as well as frighten ghosts and chase them away.  For breakfast on Dae-bo-reum, O-gok-bap, a five-grain rice consisting of rice, millet, Indian millet, beans and red beans is served with various dried herbs.

Two Questions, Geun-mi.

Do you eat it with kimchi?

And do dentists have increased business right after this holiday?

Imagine mimed street theater on steroids and you get NANTA, an over the top performance featuring four cooks who have one hour to prepare a wedding feast.  Throw in a bad tempered manager and the fun gets super charged.

For a group of foodies feasting on richly different Korean foods, this was the perfect climax to another full day.

Along side a mostly Korean audience, we laughed and applauded our way through death defying knife-throwing antics, eye-boggling plate juggling and movements that didn’t seem physically possible.

Do the Korean’s like broad comedy?  You bet!  Since 1997, this brilliant comedy has pulled in the largest audience numbers in the county’s history.   It’s even had an extended run on Broadway.

As we strolled outside on a warm October evening, we all agreed that we didn’t see how it was possible after a satisfying dinner, but we were hungry for more Korean food.  My friend Pom says that after she has watched an episode of her favorite Korean food sitcom, her husband knows he’s going to have to take her out for Korean food!  Don’t you love the power of suggestion?

Given the frequency of sampling Korean restaurants in Seattle as well as New York and Dallas, I thought Kimchi was, well, kimchi

My eyes popped, my taste buds applauded and I waxed lyrical with other foodies on my excursion to Korea last week.  Apparently there are over 100 varies of   this simple but vibrant pickled vegetable staple that have become synonymous with Korean cuisine.

While getting into chili paste up to our elbows didn’t make me or my fellow travelers experts on what we came to see as pure food art, it did give us a new appreciation for what we got to sample three times a day in Korea. As we chopped, blended and then spread the glorious red paste over leaf after leaf of Chinese cabbage, then rolled it into a small soccer sized ball, the best was yet to come.  

At our very next meal, the waitress arrived at our ladened table with a pair of oversized scissors and went after the ball of cabbage, revealing a palate of tempting aromas, textures and colors.

Before you race out for the ingredients, expecting to serve it to this week-end’s dinner guests, those neatly (ok, for us, not so neatly) wrapped balls ferment away in specially designed pots in the ground for a minimum of a year.  Talk about delayed gratification!

But I’m up for it!   Anybody in the Pacific Northwest know where I can buy one a couple of kimchi pots?