Cafeteria Food in Korean Schools

So.

I don't know a lot about American school cafeteria food. I went to public school for one year in fourth grade and that was about it. I remember it being...alright? They had good polish sausage and pizza? I ate cafeteria food my whole time in college and THAT was good (except when I worked in a cafeteria and saw how it was made *shudder* So...much...Sysco...), but I think college cafeteria food and elementary/middle/high school food is way different.

That said, my school cafeteria food is good. As in really, really good. The last school I worked at's food was good about once, maybe TWICE a week on average, but mostly bland/bad, etc...The worst part is that they were really nice and insisted on giving me lots of free food. In massive bulk quantities that would go bad in a week. I had about 50 pounds of kimchi in my fridge at one point that I kinda sorta ignored for four, five months and then decided to see what it looked like. It was kinda like that one "Cowboy Bebop" episode with the lobster...Throwing that all away was fun since I had to scoop it all out into a bag piece by piece. Kinda wanted to burn the container after...

ANYWAYS. Here is a week in the food I eat. Kind of. You see, I only have 3 days here of cafeteria food, and that's how it's going to be for awhile, because we're eating out a lot right now for lunch since there's new teachers and lots of welcome lunches and dinners. Also, I kinda forgot my camera a lot, but still only missed one meal. I think you'll get a good general idea from here though. :)

And without further adieu: Tasty Cafeteria Food of Korea!

This was Monday's fare: Rice with little beans mixed in, a chili-tomato based soup that has chunks of ground pork and ground tofu and some seaweed and onions in it, Asian spinach (which is really different from Western spinach. It's...smaller and thinner and tastes completely different but yet you can still tell it's spinach. If..that...makes...sense...?), cabbage kimchi (a staple!), and...fish fillet with sweet and sour chili barbecue sauce, and a tangerine. It wasn't bad. The problem with eating fish in Korea is that there's usually ten million bones in every bite so you spend more time spitting out bones then actually getting to eat the fish (You end up spitting out both), but this one had...minimal bones! Yay! It didn't suck. Tuesday I went out for lunch with the Chinese language teachers. We spoke in Chinese and went to a generic restaurant that everyone goes to all the time and it's TECHNICALLY good, but you get tired of it fast. It's called a 백반(Baek Bahn) restaurant. This means you get a crapton of side-dishes, and a bowl of rice, and usually a soup or two, plus maybe a main dish if you feel like being a baller.
This is the first round of side dishes. Um...from bottom left to top you have: cold jellyfish strips with eggs and veggies (Bleh), spicy cucumber kimchi, and delicious radish kimchi. From the other side you have spicy chili clams (I avoid most seafood here like the plague since our province is landlocked and stuff from the ocean that's not freshwater has given me really bad stomach problems before. You don't come to my province and eat fish. You go to Busan or Gwangju for that, yo.), chili sesame leaves, and jalapeno peppers with dried anchovies.

From bottom left to "L"-shaped top little bowls, we have my favorite sidedish of all times, soy sauce soaked quail eggs with strips of marinated pork, strips of ginseng in a chili sauce, garlic roots, and dried seaweed with which to eat your rice. The big plate has an assortment of veggies, bean sprouts, and shrimp. It was underwhelming.

Finally, there was spicy bean paste soup (됀장지깨) with onions, zucchini, and tofu chunks, salad that I don't eat since mayo-based dressing (Actually mayo in general makes me dry heave), steamed egg in a bowl, and way in the back there's little patties you make using egg and meat and veggies.

I missed Wednesday's lunch. Well, I forgot to bring my camera. It wasn't a big loss though. It was curry. In Korea, their cafeteria curry...well, imagine regular delicious Indian curry. Now add about two liters of water to it and really low grade meat, and throw it on some rice. Bada bing bada boom. They also had mini-hamburgers that I couldn't eat because they had, once more, ketchup and mayo. It's weird. Yesterday for lunch I went to a not so classy part of Seoul and had chili pig intestines, and despite the horrible, horrible things they did to my stomach, I enjoyed them. Yet ketchup and mayo and mustard and pickle relish makes me feel ill. Indeed, just the smell and having them in my vicinity can do horrible things to me. So for the first time I barely ate lunch, and went out and got ddeokbokki, and had a lovely chat with two nice ladies from Jeolla province who ran the food cart and they gave me free stuff and it was nice. Alas, no picture.

Thursday's fare was much, much, much better. We have cabbage kimchi, my SECOND favorite side dish, dried anchovies, some chicken, cabbage, and potatoes stewed in a chili sauce, some rice, and some seaweed soup. Why is this portion so much smaller than the Monday and upcoming Friday portion? Welp, I forgot to take a picture of my food, so I grabbed a bewildered student and took a picture of his tray. In my province, they have free lunches for the kids (alas, not the teachers. :( I have to pay about two bucks a meal but it's all you can eat. Huzzah!) , but the kids don't get to get as much as they want. The cafeteria ladies serve them. The teachers can serve themselves. Huzzah!
And finally, my Friday food. It was lovely and slightly overflowing. We have quail eggs (See, I love quail eggs in Korea. You know why? They're so #@@%#@%# expensive and classy in the US and I never got to eat them there, but here they're cheap and available and when soaked in soy sauce with pork, so, so, so good), we have seaweed paper for me to wrap my rice in, and then we have cabbage kimchi. The soup is called "Sujaebi/수재비" and it's kinda like American dumpling soup, because its flour and a broth, but...it's kinda bland. No matter where you get it. Eh.

And thus, because I feel lame for only having three cafeteria meals, here's what I had for lunch in Seoul Saturday!
Cheesy Kimchi Fried Rice! I would have loved it, but...they microwaved it. And there was barely any kimchi. But it was really, really cheap, and look at the side dishes that came with it!
We got, from bottom right to top, a broth of...soy paste? Chicken? I'm actually not sure what it is, but in kimbap shops it's actually quite common. On top there's spicy odeng (kinda like a fish cake...sausage...thing? It's Japanese and lovely. I'll make a post about it sometime.), potatoes soaked in honey (more delicious then one would think!), cucumber kimchi, and cabbage kimchi. I hypothetically might have eaten this all in less then three minutes. The side dishes that is. Plus in Korea you can get as many refills as you want of side dishes (I've never tested to see how many refills you can actually get. The max I've ever tried is 3. Now, the amount of times I go back to get hot water for the same tea bag...)

So that's kind of a week in my lunches. Except for one.

The Korean phrase for the day (probably horribly misspelled) is what I say whenever I leave a restaurant: 좋은 하루 되시고 수고 하세요! (Joh-eun- ha-lu-day-shee-goh-soo-goh-ha-say-yoh). This means, "Have a nice day and good business!" or something like that. They always smile and thank me when I say it so I'm pretty sure it's correct. O_o

Busan Eats!

Truck o' Racism!

I figure I should start out with two posts that show what I'll be writing about. :) I eat out a lot in Korea because there's so much good food (also it's cheaper to eat out then cook), but possibly my favorite city to eat in is Busan. Their food is always really, really good, the people are friendly, the ocean is lovely, and it has a slower, more chilled atmosphere than Seoul, so I dig it.
Whenever I go there, I usually have the same eating itinerary. I usually go to this restaurant first:
If you can see it says, "The first and most delicious pork soup with rice restaurant in Korea". In Busan there's a really, really good food called "Pork Soup with Rice" (돼지 국밥) and I haven't found it anywhere else. This restaurant is in a district called Seomyeon and is located outside Subway Exit 7 by all the food carts...

I've been there 6 times, and never been disappointed. You order the soup, and you get this.

Not bad for 5 bucks, eh? From left to right, it's noodles, onions and garlic, scallions, kimchi, bean paste sauce, peppers, tiny shrimp, and soy sauce.

Eating this soup is a bit tricky, as you have to take the noodles, and the scallions and the tiny shrimp, and put them in the soup, but then you take the pork out, and mix it in the soy sauce and the bean paste soup and some of the scallions, shrimp, and garlic. So you eat the pork and the soup separately. The pork is simply in the soup to get softer and juicier. So your soup looks like this:
Your pork then looks like this:It's very good, and the owners are very friendly. Also, you get a free coffee afterwards! That always seals the deal for me. :)

I also always take the subway to an area called "Jagalchi" which is possibly the biggest fish market in Korea and is AWESOME, but I don't usually eat the fish, no, I go to an area across the street called "PFF Square" (Pusan Film Festival Square, where they have a movie festival every fall that's kind of a big deal internationally), and there's row after row of food carts that you can get cheap and delicious street food at that has, as of yet, knock on wood, not given me horrible food poisoning. :)

One of the specialties in Busan is their seafood pancake, as shown here:


It has scallions and pieces of squid in it, and is delicious. It's pictured here with some dumplings! You dip it in some soy sauce and it's awesome. It's really cheap in Busan but for some reason it's ridiculously expensive everywhere else in Korea.

I thought I'd be adventurous and try this noodle dish:

I didn't quite understand what the woman told me it was. It looked Vietnamese-y, so I thought it'd be good, but it was ridiculously bland, so I decided to drown it in sauce.
Nope. Still not good. Although it looks like Chap Chae (찹채, Korean clear cellophane noodles). Then I walked around for a bit as there's quite a lot of nice shops to see, and found zilch, but I decided I'd walk till I was hungry enough for dessert which was...
Pumpkin Porridge (호박 축)! It's always lovely. It's hot and sweet and has sweet rice cakes and sometimes raisins or dates in it. It's one of my favorites. The owner was quite nice and friendly too and I talked to her for a bit and she wanted me to keep talking so she gave me a free bowl of her other porridge.

Red Bean Porridge! (팥 축)! This admittedly isn't my favorite, but it was free and wasn't too bad. It has lots of chunks of rice cake in it, and I got to talk to the nice owner and hear about how she misses her daughter who moved far away. I really didn't get most of the conversation because the accent down south is a bit harder for me to understand and it has it's own dialect, so I smiled and nodded a lot and said the Korean phrase for "I'm sorry to hear that/Because you're in pain I feel bad" something like that...(유감 입니다/Yoo Gam Im Ni Da, in case you ever hear someone tell you something sad).

The worst part of going to Busan is being full. That means you can't eat any more delicious food. It kinda sucks.

Every time I go to Busan I go to my favorite place in all of Korea. It is a magical place where dreams come true, and you leave feeling tranquil and joyful as diabetes slowly sets in.

Yes my friends, this is "OPS". It's a French bakery in Haeundae Beach (with another that just opened near Gwangan Bridge!) that unlike Paris Baguette and Tous Le Jours (French bakeries that are a chain in Korea that serve pastries that the French would faint in horror if they knew were being marketed as authentically French) tastes authentic and real and just plain wonderful.

So yeah...I always eat too much here. Let's see what the damage was this time:
Firstly, their coffee is amazing. That there is a Caramel Macchiato and is lovely. The bun that's cut in half is a Hot Tuna Bun that had tuna and peas and onions in it and is lovely. To the side of it is a cheesy onion bun that was so-so (I have a high standard for this place by now) and then I got a mini pizza which they have only had twice in the six times I've been there (I've been to Busan six times and kinda always go to the same places to eat while still trying new places).

Then I realized after eating all of these in less then ten minutes (Yeah. It's kinda bad.) that I hadn't gotten anything sweet (Well, I got a Blueberry Bun for breakfast and some Croissants for the Nutella I had waiting for me at home...), so I then went back and bought more, and saw that they had a pastry they've only had ONCE before (they change their pastries every day and don't offer the same thing all the time. It's all on rotation.)
This. It's a light flaky bun with chilled creamy custard inside it that tastes like heaven. It's so, so, so very good. Love it.

Aaaaaaaaaand then three hours later I realized that even though I was ridiculously full, if I didn't eat something I'd be starving by the time I went to bed, so um...I kinda went back to PFF Square to get some more street food. This was the somewhat tasty result.

This is one of the food carts I ate at.
This is spicy rice cake (떡볶이) with sausage (순대) and fish cake (오댕). Everywhere else in Korea it's delicious but in Busan it's never quite right. There's just something off about the flavor.
I got some meat dumplings. They weren't too bad. The significance of this food cart is I was nice and chatty and so the lady gave me extra food. It was nice.

This sign kinda made me chuckle. It's a place to take your dog, and the bottom characters in red, green, and blue kinda translate to, "Long Live Mister Dog!". It was kinda cute and nonsensical.

So yep. If you go to Busan, be bold, yo. Just go out, try all the foods, don't be shy, and don't just go to a boring burger or kimbap joint because Busan offers some of the best foods you can't get anywhere else. Next time I go I'll try some fish and make some good recommendations thus. :)

And the Korean to teach now that's a companion piece to the last post is this: When you finish a meal, tell the waitress, owner, cook, whoever you see before you leave, "맛 있게 먹었어요"(Mash kay Moh Goss Oh Yoh". It means, "I ate deliciously", or, "The Food Was Deliciously". I say this when the food actually WAS good, and therefore it's deserving. :) Also it's nice to let them know how it was.

Stay tuned for the Cafeteria Food of Korea! :)

First Post! Lemon White Chocolate Cookies.

Hi! So I'm starting a blog because I like eating and trying different kinds of food here in Korea, as well as experimenting with baking in a country where it's a bit tricky. So I thought I'd start a blog. Thus, here goes it!

Today I was going to dive into working on some lesson planning but then decided to bake some cookies for the first time here in Korea. I have a lot of lemons since they've been really cheap, as well as some white chocolate chunks I bought in Seoul in case I needed them for cooking, so I decided to combine the two, and sure enough, there was a recipe online for 'em! You really can find recipe's for anything (Except for how to cook with cough drops which I feel like doing since I think they taste good. No one else has tried it! I smell a challenge!), so I, having all the ingredients, except for vanilla (Good luck finding that in Korea outside Seoul!, decided to give it a whirl. Ingredients Assemble!
So as I usually did, I went to Food.com, and found a recipe (275538 if you're interested!) and I had everything they required, so here's what you need:

1/2 Cup of Butter
1 Cup of White Sugar
1 Egg
A Tablespoon of Milk
Juice of One Lemon(They say one teaspoon but I squeezed a whole lemon and just threw that in there to make up for lost liquids from the vanilla
1 and 3/4ths Cups of Flour
1 Teaspoon of Baking Powder
A pinch of salt
As many piece of white chocolate as you can cut up into small pieces and try to fill up a cup (I bought two bars of Japanese import DARS Chocolate at a 7/11 and ALMOST filled up a cup)
Lemon Zest of One Lemon!


First you do something called "Cream the Butter". This is when you take the butter, and the sugar, and you stir it in a circular motion really quickly with a fork. I've always done it with a pair of beaters, but as I don't have these I did a fork. It turned out okay! You mix it until it looks like a snow cone. Then I peeled the lemon using a carrot peeler, and put the little bits in a bowl. Then I microwaved the lemons to make them softer, and then squeezed them into a bowl and threw away the seeds. Then I threw all the ingredients, save the chocolate chunks, in a bowl.



Then came the mind-numbingly dull task of taking the chocolate and cutting into eighths.
Then you throw it all together, stir it with a whisk in my case (It was so thick it bent the whisk! Didn't know that was possible. O_o)
Then you throw it in the oven, and if you live in the US it needs to be at 350, but if you live in a topsy-turvy country that uses Celsius, then you do it at 175 degrees Celsius. They say you need to put them in for 12 to 15 minutes but mine baked in less then ten.
This is the end result. This is the first batch and they were a bit brown on the edges since I left them in for 12 minutes or so, but they were prettier then the second batch which I placed too closely together in the pan.

As far as taste goes, I think they were average, because they were a bit crumbly, but I gave them a few people who live on my floor and also our buildings janitor, and they liked them, and the janitor ended up taking 3, so I'm going to declare it a success! I also have enough to take to school tomorrow, so we shall see how they like 'em. I just started in a new office with new teachers and I've found that when in doubt and wanting to get along with the teachers in your office and make friends, bring food! Everyone likes food, and if you make it yourself, it really shows you care. Unless the food tastes bad. I think. Anyways, I'll see how they go over.

Also, I'm gonna try and close every entry with a useful Korean (at least since I'm learning it now) phrase. The best one that works for me and is always very useful when going to a restaurant is,

"Chal Mok Gae sum ni da." (잘 먹게습니다). Whenever I'm about to eat a meal someone gives me, I say that. We don't really have an equivalent in English, but it means, "I will eat this deliciously." It's nice and polite, and I always say it to the waitresses or cafeteria ladies I work with since I figure it could make their day.

Stay tuned for how to make a Slightly Burnt Cheesy Tuna Casserole! :)