Recovery - Eggs in Baskets

For someone whose life revolves around work and karate, it shouldn't be surprising that weekends are suddenly gone, three out of five workdays involve at least an hour and a half in heavy So-Cal traffic, and sleep is almost nonexistent. Training for my career and extra training for karate drain the life out of me like forgetting to water an orchid. All this running around has me cobbling together meals from bits, pieces and leftovers, seemingly perpetually scrambling for extra calories so that I don't faint during (or after!) a bazillion two-hour class of intense karate. Luckily, I've finally found some time today, a blue moon free half-weekend, to put pan to stove and eat!

It seems fitting that my first post back from, well, the past six months, should be something a little more simple and typical of what I'm really eating these days. I had a post about candied citrus (!) almost ready to go, then it languished for 3 months. Which means, if you think about it, I've been wanting to come back and procrastinating on this for a full 3 months.

Meep.

So, what did I do in the last six months? Not necessarily in chronological order:

- Graduate with my master's (shamefully "mastering out" of a PhD program, as they say)
- Find a job (!)
- Get a raise (!!)
- Start a program that will culminate in my parts inspection certification
- Spin my somewhat blue-collar job into an internship and recovery period from grad school
- Move more south in Southern California, within walking distance of said job
- Split the purchases of significant pieces of furniture for the apartment
- Make shodan (1st degree black belt!!!) in shotokan karate
- Get really, really, really physiologically drunk from a single shot (same day)
- Drive/ride (I carpool) over 1,400 miles on the way to and from karate
- Start the instructor training program in the AJKA-I organization (karate)
- Teach a 40-kid karate class by myself (with assistance from a lovely brown belt friend)
- Karate crisis! AKA why our karate dojo (school) has so few women
- Stay up until ???am in the morning talking with my friend and forever karate idol
- Recover from karate crisis (thanks to said friend and karate idol!)
- Pay first deposit toward the karate trip to Japan I'll be taking in September (!!!)
- Start taking proper care of my face (Korean skincare!)
- Learn more about skin chemistry and ingredients than I ever needed, but I love it
- Get my boyfriend into wearing sunscreen everyday (he'll be pretty forever <3)
- Help a friend write several academic papers/applications/letters
- Speak three languages at work
- Start investigating new jobs... one that actually uses my engineering degree...!

All of this means that my kitchen adventures are less ice cream cakes (story for another time...) and more simple, sustaining food like this, an Egg in a Hole. I'm told they go by many names, but as my personal history consists more of rice and scrambled eggs than fanciful fried egg dishes, I'll leave those English names to the experts... those who grew up in English-speaking countries with English-speaking parents ;)

And here we go!

Egg in a Basket
Egg-strapolated from Wikipedia

Ingredients (scale up as desired!) for 1 Egg in a Basket
1 egg
1 slice of bread
Butter
Cooking oil (I like the big olive one from Costco. Huge, reasonably priced, and tasty)
Salt (optional)
Pepper (optional)

Directions:

1. With either a cookie cutter or a knife, cut a hole in the slice/s of bread. I like round holes, but if you prefer corners, then who am I to deny?

2. In a frying pan, add about a teaspoon of oil and around the same amount of butter. Fry the slice/s of bread on one side. You're going to have to flip these slices, so leave a bit of extra space.

3. Add a bit of oil or butter to the hole/s in the middle of the toast. With the toasted side up, crack an egg into the hole of each toast. Allow to cook for at least 30 seconds, or until the egg whites have set.

4. Sprinkle salt and pepper if desired. With a spatula, lift up each egg in the hole, add a touch more oil or butter, and flip the toasts. Now it gets a bit interesting: controlling whether your yolks are runny. I like them so, but my boyfriend prefers medium-cooked eggs. About 30 seconds more will get you said runny yolks, and about 1 minute will cook them about medium. The more oil/butter you add, the earlier you can get away with removing the eggs.

5. Plate and serve! Enjoy!

Postscript: Yes, of course I fried the little bread cut-outs afterward to make butter toast :)

Update: Almost done with this post, I smelled something oddly toasty. I went to the kitchen to find that while I was writing, my rice on the stove had totally burned to a pretty, speckled, black/toasted beige/silver/white pattern. Good job, Asian-American food blogger.

Thankful Thursday - Precooked Rice

It was actually our last day at POSCO today, a bittersweet ending to 6 weeks of work and weekend trips.  On one hand, I'm incredibly thankful that I got to be here.  On the other, I will miss my mentors and their laid-back approach to work and schedules, despite their own demanding workloads.  They put up with the little Korean we knew (except for our resident translator, of course), assigned us doable tasks and on occasion, even took us out for coffee.  They were fun and full of life, talking cheerfully amongst themselves and jokingly teasing each other.

Several of them chuckled at my daily lunchbox, made to save money and reduce my caloric intake (I get sleepy after lunch if I eat too much).  The most important component of this lunchbox was the rice. Since we don't have any cooking materials, I purchase cheap precooked rice, which clocks in at either 315 Calories (on the label) or 840 Calories (calculated from 4 Calories/gram of carbohydrates x 210 grams of rice) per box.  Quite a discrepancy, I realize.  Still, half a box along with some seaweed rice flavoring kept me happy until my snack time, around 3:00-3:30pm.

Grocery stores are my friend.

One of my Korean memories will always remain instant rice, eaten as I look curiously onto my mentors' and friends' lunches, consisting of traditional food along with kimchi and other side dishes.  Lunchtime was always a social hour, with the whole office going together to the cafeteria, sometimes joined by other coworkers.  Talk (mostly in Korean, occasional English), laughter and chewing would echo around the table, contributing to the din of the crowded room.  I did love the cafeteria lunches, when I had to buy them (such as today, actually... I didn't have time this morning), but I loved simply sitting with our mentors more.

감사합니다, POSCO Family.  You're an amazing company with amazing employees.

Thankful Thursday - Digestive Biscuits

So, I realize that Digestive Biscuits doesn't sound the most appetizing of snacks.  My dad even made fun of them once, actually, joking that they were digested biscuits...  But despite their interesting name, translated from the Chinese, no doubt, they're actually one of my favorite foods.  I first encountered them as a child, as they had been one of my mum's favorites as a child, too.  She grew up with them on Hong Kong, but they are difficult to find (and a little expensive, for snack biscuits) in the U.S.  In Korea, there's another brand, and they come in cute little boxes with individual packets inside.

Hmm, portion control...

I'm more used to seeing them in tubes.  But no matter what type of packaging, they're always a wonderful snack.  Partly whole-wheat (14%, in this case!), they're surprisingly tender and crisp.  Instead of crunching, they shatter between your teeth, leaving you with a mouthful of slightly sweet, barely salty and flavorful crumbs.  I'm eating some right now, actually (guilty smile).  They resemble graham crackers, but softer, less sweet and so, so, so much better.  I'm not sure if they're actually nutritious, but they are absolutely delicious. In a rare second picture, here they are, out of the package.

Great for snack, dessert, breakfast, or simply just because...

Songdo Restaurants

I meant to document so many more meals!  I eat at least three times a day, so it is not material I lack.  Rather, it is the spare time to compose and to upload.  With just over 9 hours a day spent at work and my goal of 7 to 8 hours of sleep (so I can "store up" before the semester starts, I suppose...), it's getting difficult to post regularly.  It's even becoming a challenge to keep up with my Thankful Thursdays, which are intentionally short and typically single-photo.

We've enjoyed multiple memorable meals in South Korea, but this post will focus on three of our favorites in the street mall of Songdo.  From the cheap high-schoolers' favorite Hans Deli to the shabu shabu (hot pot) and buffet, our edible adventures continue.

During our second week in Korea, we wandered in Songdo, looking for a cheap place to eat.  One of our company can't handle spicy food, I avoid meat and our resident translator wasn't around, so this is an interesting set of specs.  After perusing menus and finally stumbling upon one with pictures and English (this was quite a feat!), we decided upon Han's Deli, a place where high schoolers frequent for its cheap meals, as we were told later.  I ordered the bonito rice shown in my last Thankful Thursday post and my friend who can't handle spice ordered the pork cutlet.

Bonito rice on the left, pork on the right.

The rice was lovely.  Hot, essentially fried rice with mushrooms and possibly squid bits throughout, a generous dusting of flavorful, cheerful-looking flakes on top.  The flavor wasn't particularly deep and it was a little salty, but it was satisfying.  And I got to take half of it home for lunch the next day :)

The pork was not as good, I'm sad to report.  I didn't eat this, but my spice-averse friend did.  It was breaded and stuffed with cheese and potatoes, with a sauce on top.  It was accompanied by a cute scoop of rice on the right and a little bit of macaroni salad, up top.  Unfortunately, my friend didn't feel well after the meal, later that night, and thinks it was the sauce, which he did not like.  Both dishes came with pickles, the more Western dill kind and bright yellow pickled daikon.  The bonito rice also had some white shredded cabbage.

Overall, a filling, cheap meal.  Not the best quality, of course, but I liked it for its price and halfway decent food.

The next weekend, we visited Seoul in search of shopping and adventure.  If you've been visiting my other blog, There and Back Again (TBA, I guess), you'll know that Mr. Pizza was actually two Fridays ago, right before one of our previous trips to Seoul.  If you pay a little extra, you're allowed to take as much as you want from the little salad bar, which has various items, including fresh lychees!  They were probably previously frozen, but still very good.  My favorite item was a green jelly, which had pineapple bits in it.  I think the structure is provided by agar agar and not gelatin, since pineapple has a tendency to prevent the cross-linking needed to form the structure in gelatin.

Fruit, including lychees (round brown things), canned mandarin slices, grape tomatoes, a peep of jelly and mashed potatoes on the left.  On the right, more mashed potatoes, crab salad, croutons.

Another plate: more croutons and some grape jelly.  But the green jelly was better :)

I found an interesting trend in food here; whenever it's somewhat Western-style, things tend to be a little sweet.  The mashed potatoes were delicious, with corn, and interestingly sweet.  The rest of the items weren't particularly notable, although tasty, except for the green jelly.  I have an obsession with sweet jelly foods and sticky foods like rice cakes, and simply adored the sweet, tart, fruity jelly.

Our food came soon after we chose our salads.

Baked spaghetti with so, so much cheese and a sampler basket of chicken, cheese and corn.

Our resident translator enjoyed his spaghetti and my roommate liked her sampler basket, although she felt it was rather expensive, and would not have purchased it had she known its price.

My spice-averse friend and I split a pizza, with meat on his side and vegetables on mine.

The pizza was about a medium, back in the States.  Gratuitous slice with oozy cheese shot!

Something rather interesting in Korea is the portion sizes.  The food is priced rather more reasonably, in my sense, than that in the U.S., with somewhat smaller portions and lower prices.  I really enjoyed this pizza.  I ate two slices and saved the other two for later in the weekend, having gotten pretty full on the salad bar offerings.  I liked the way the toppings were actually underneath the cheese, which kept everything much neater than usual, and the flavors were bright.  You could taste the peppers, tomato sauce, olives and mushrooms in the pizza through the cheese.  And of course, cheese is cheese is cheese.  I haven't learned very much about it beyond good cheese and crappy processed cheese food.  What do I say about it?  I like cheese...  I think it was plain mozzarella.  Maybe with Parmesan, maybe not.  I couldn't tell, and quite honestly, I don't really care.  It was good cheese :)

A few weekends later, we encountered one of our guides whom we had not seen in several weeks by chance, and invited him out to dinner with the four of us.

So, our guide photographed me back with his phone, my roommate caught it all on her camcorder,
and our spice-averse friend simply eats.  I wonder who has the right priorities here?

Our resident translator was due to show up a few minutes later, after visiting a PC lab (basically an internet cafe with many games and comfortable chairs) for a few hours.  The food arrived before he did, but we waited for him.  Of course, there was vegetables and meat....  And a little ball of fresh noodles with the vegetables :)

Pumpkin, mushrooms, fresh greens, noodles.  And the Koreans love their meat...  I think it's beef.

Plates full of tasty food make me happy...

This was my first plate, just to try everything that looked good.  Fruit is somewhat expensive here, so I took the chance to enjoy some.  I liked the soft, sweet bread roll, hot, crisp fries, and especially the flavorful fried rice.  With plenty of small-chopped vegetables and tiny shrimp, it was probably one of the best fried rice dishes I've ever had.  And I'm Chinese, and have eaten a lot of fried rice!  I find it ironic that my favorite is in South Korea, at a buffet where fried rice is only another item in a pot.  The "deviled" eggs were actually good, without the overdose of vinegar or mayonnaise or whatever it is that makes them so sour and salty back in the States.  But my favorite new item was definitely the dubokki, cylindrical rice cakes in a savory, spicy sauce.

Some of my favorites, clockwise from left: the fries, a crispy rice cake, the fried rice, dubokki and the eggs.

I'm definitely learning how to make the dubokki back in the States.  There is this slightly sweet and savory tinge to the spicy red chili powder heat, which made it actually enjoyable to have my mouth on fire.  Luckily, the eggs were in this creamy sauce which made them a perfect pairing to the Fires-of Hell (yet astoundingly delicious) dubokki.

After the meal, I had everyone sit for a shot.  Our guide and our resident translator both look so.... Korean...    

Look, I processed it!  I think it looks a little better than the original.

And those are some of the lovely restaurants in Songdo.  We visited a place where you could eat unlimited meat on the Korean barbecue for a pretty low price, but sadly, I forgot my camera that day.  We had gone after work for my roommate's birthday, but we may go again.  If we do, it'll show up on this blog!  Next up, some Seoul food!  Sorry, couldn't resist...

Thankful Thursday - Bonito Flakes

It's unusual that I thank something I found at a restaurant, but today, I present the tiny, waving flakes on top of hot rice dishes.  They're also commonly used in dashi, or Japanese stock.  These little bursts of flavor and nutrition are none other than bonito flakes, scraped off a dried fish.  As I haven't cooked with this ingredient before (but will be doing so once I get my hands on some, believe me), I am showing them on a dish from Han's Deli, an inexpensive restaurant in the shopping district of Songdo.

Alright, so my meal was downright cheap, and I took half home.  But it was delicious!

Reviews of our favorite Songdo restaurants to come soon, I promise!

The Bread Shop

On the last Thankful Thursday post, I talked about a cheese bun.  This is a little more on where we found them!

In Songdo shopping district, we discovered a tiny bread shop crammed with delicious things right across from the bus station where we return to campus.

That's really all of it.  Some ovens are on the wall, right behind the tray
of breads to be displayed and plucked by hungry customers.

I bought this, a bun which we originally thought was corn and cheese.  Upon further inspection, it resembled yellow pickled daikon, but when I bit in, proved to be sweetened chestnuts and cheese.  A little more expensive than usual (buns are typically 500 to 1000 won each, about 50 cents to a dollar), but delicious!  I ate half of it on the bus ride home...

Wrapped neatly in plastic.

And the rest of it for breakfast the next day :)

It was soft bread, exactly like that made in Chinese bakeries in San Francisco, and the ones I remember from Hong Kong.  The chestnuts were probably preserved, sweet as they were, but still flavorful.  I don't know what kind of cheese was on top, but it was salty and very buttery, perhaps a type of mozzarella with a little more pungency.  It paired well with the sweet chestnuts to make two satisfying and tasty meals.  

There will likely be still more reports of the bread shop to come as I explore its variety :)

Thankful Thursday - Cheese Buns

So, those of you following this blog (yup, all... let me count... three of you) will notice that although it lists Friday as the publish date of this post, it's technically still Thursday back in the States.  As it's my blog and no one has claimed to the contrary, I declare this post valid by the clock of California.

This week, I am featuring the delightful cheese bun from the little bread shop in Songdo, Incheon, South Korea.  Priced around 500 won, or about less than 50 cents each, they serve as a tasty and satisfying breakfast, lunch or dinner.  

The bread is soft, almost softer than the Chinese bakery buns from Hong Kong or San Francisco.  There seem to be two types of cheese, cubes of creamy, salty and tangy (but fresh) on the inside and one chewy and melted on top.  Each bun is sprinkled with something green, maybe crumbled parsley?

Mmmm, tasty food.

Thankful Thursday - "Choco Pies"

The reason the food is in quotes today is that in Korea, this curiously tasty sweet has some other name that I can't read.  Despite being individually packaged and listing about 15 thousand (mostly artificial) ingredients on the wrapper, I can't seem to resist it.  It's two small, slightly dry, plain vanilla cakes sandwiching a soft and somewhat chewy marshmallow fluff, then dipped in a chocolatey coating.  I don't even like marshmallows, but this has become my emergency snack or sweet in the office or in the dorm.  I found a 12-pack on sale the other day and expect it to last no more than another week; that's how much I like this sweet.  One of my life goals is be to recreate this treat from scratch :)

It looks so neat on the package...  It's kind of crumbly in real life.

Thankful Thursday - Pizza

So, I nearly forgot again, but here it is, a post on time!  Since we're lucky enough to have Fridays off, we just finished our first week of work.  It's quite amazing inside the POSCO R&D offices.  There's a cafeteria on campus that serves pretty darned good food for low prices.  Unfortunately, security is actually super-tight, and we're not allowed to bring laptops or cameras inside.  Hence, no pictures of the inside or the food :(

However, one night, we decided to order pizza, a bit of an American phenomenon.  To indulge in a little Western pleasure, we chose fairly ordinary toppings, mushroom on one and ham and corn on the other.

Mushroom on the left, ham and corn on the right.

I just wanted to appreciate this Italian-turned American-turned Korean treat.  Truly global!  

Speaking of global... So I tried to do laundry today.  The machines are all in Korean, and I didn't figure out that the cycle took 4 hours and 35 minutes to finish both a wash and dry (in the same machine!).  Luckily, a kind person was able to help me get it started, but only after I realized the laundry room would be closed when it finally finished.  Later that night, I went back down and encountered another kind person.  I started out with one of the few Korean phrases I knew, 죄송하지만 (jwe song ha ji man), which is something along the lines of, "I'm sorry to bother you, but..." and quickly realized she didn't speak English.  She spoke Korean and Mandarin, which would have been helpful had my other language been Korean or Mandarin instead of Cantonese.  With these four languages, however, she managed to get across that the laundry room opened tomorrow at 6:00am.  Hurrah for globalization!

Meals in South Korea - The First Weekend

안녕하세요 (Anyeounghaseyo), or Hello, from Korea!  For the next 6 weeks, I'll be an intern at POSCO Research and Development Center in Songdo, Incheon, South Korea and living at the State University of New York (SUNY) Korea dormitory nearby.  For more detailed reports, please visit here :)

Along with language and other cultural differences, of course, the food is both familiar and fantastically different.  Our first meal in Korea was dinner at the SUNY Korea cafeteria.  

Soup, rice, imitation crab meat (mostly fish), bean sprouts and kimchi.
I regret to admit that kimchi may be an acquired taste.
I have not acquired a taste for kimchi.

The dinner was alright.  The food was well-prepared, but I hadn't quite adjusted to the time and wasn't quite hungry.  The soup was a warm broth of beef and daikon (white radish).  It was quite rich to my taste, since I don't really eat meat.  The rice was ordinary white rice, comforting to me since I grew up eating it with every dinner.  The bean sprouts were nutty and lightly cooked, a mild dish.  The red item on the left is the imitation crab meat, which was cooked in a sort of ketchup sauce.  The red item on the right is the kimchi.  Suffice it to say that this national dish of Korea is very distinctive, sour and spicy.  It is typically served with every meal, sometimes along with pickled daikon, which turns a bright yellow (not pictured).

The next day, we returned to the cafeteria for breakfast.  Due to a mistake on my part, we were down about a half hour before breakfast started.  Luckily for us, the women who ran the kitchen were kind enough to allow us to buy tickets and eat anyway.  They forgave our lack of Korean and directed us to the trays and food.  Several embarrassed bows and "kamsamnida"s (thank you) later, we gratefully sat down to generous portions.

I loved this meal...

The mound of rice accompanies every meal, this time white rice mixed with black rice.  Not much of a distinguishing flavor, but there was a pleasant, hearty texture reminiscent of oatmeal.  The spicy beef broth included bean sprouts and daikon, very satisfying.  Soup also accompanies each meal.  The brown, wheel-like objects at the top were lotus root slices cooked in soy sauce, a sweet-salty vegetable with a crunch.  My favorite item were the tiny quail eggs cooked in soy sauce, however.  Hard-boiled and peeled, a thin, chewy white surrounds a rich, creamy yolk that takes up about 80% of the volume of the egg.  Artery-blocking, for sure, but absolutely delicious.  I was interested to find that in Korea, water is not served with the meal.  If you order a beverage in a restaurant, they will serve it during the food.  At the cafeteria and later, the food court, however, small steel cups are provided for the customer to sip hot or cold water after the meal.

Later that day, we passed through a food court.  I was amazed at the beautiful, realistic glass copies of food that they showcased.  I didn't order anything, but I did take some photos of the food, and a friend of mine photographed the case.  Because the models are shiny and glazed, they resemble hot soup and sauce, adding to the realism of the display.

Top left photo courtesy of Rendy.

Later that night, we visited a shopping district in Songdo, the Free Economic Zone of Incheon.  Along with electrical adapters, an alarm clock and some shirts, we got dinner at a small restaurant.  We ordered three items, none of them really Korean (except maybe the chicken wings?), but all three tasty.

My dish, the potatoes in the middle, were crisp and hot, topped with a lightly wilted, sweet and spicy peach salsa. 

The next day was a trip to Seoul, the bustling capital of South Korea.  I keep forgetting to take pictures of breakfast, but it's pretty normal; we bought bananas, soymilk and cereal to save money.  More interesting is the meal we had in Seoul, in a little restaurant on the second floor overlooking the street.  By good luck, one of our group met a young woman who was Korean, but had attended school in San Diego, California.  While she was waiting to meet her friend, she kindly led us on a tiny tour of Seoul.  Eventually, our little group wandered underground and through a street food vender alley, then we met her friend (left) for lunch at this restaurant.

Our motley crew, with most of our food :)

Upon hearing that I didn't eat meat, but I did eat seafood, the lovely person we met (2nd from the left) ordered for me a bowl of crisp greens on a bed of warm rice, topped with chunks of fish and bright orange fish eggs.

Despite the promising rice and vegetables, the fish was poorly cut, with giant chunks of tendon in most of the cubes.  Still, I enjoyed this meal.  It was a refreshing change from the cooked items we had had in the last few days, with flavorful lettuce and miniature bean sprouts.  The fish eggs were a treat as always, and although I had trouble eating one whole piece of fish at a time due to the tendons, the rich taste was very welcome.

The bowl is actually huge.  I managed to eat it all, but I didn't have dinner that night until around 10pm, which was soymilk and cereal.  Of course, I forgot to photograph it again...  

More reports of food when I find the time.  Even with frequent, cheerful breaks and an hour lunch period, 9:00am-6:00pm is tiring...  My roommate is knocked out as I type, and it's only 9:38pm!  Actually, as soon as I finish updating, I think I'll follow her example...

- 안녕히가세요 (Anyeoungkaseyo)! That's "peacefully go," or goodbye :)