A beautiful breakfast spread. (Yes, we eat fish and kimchi and all kinds of savories for breakfast, lunch and dinner…)
I think this is called beltfish? It’s a flat and long fish I haven’t seen outside of Korea. fried and sauced. We grew up eating a version of this but the owner of the restaurant also owns a fishing boat and this was caught that morning and it was absolutely the most delicious version we’ve ever had.
We went to this restaurant that specializes in acorn dishes. I LOVE Korean things made with acorn; mostly, acorn is ground into a flour and the flour is kneaded with water and cooked to form a jelly. All the variations start from there. It exermplifies my favorite features of Korean food: the resourcefulness, the thorough use of goodies that occur in nature, and the ability to create a scrumptious feast around something as simple and modest as… an acorn. Whodda thunk, right?
The shameless pornography you see above happens to be slices of smoked Korean duck, served with a bunch of vegetables and seasoning. Acorn jelly is hiding underneath the mound of yellow bean sprouts. With a side of sweet mustard sauce, this was insanely delicious, though not acorn-centric. YET. Observe:
This is acorn noodles hiding under generous sprinklings of crushed peanuts and spicy, tangy sauce. The whole lot is mixed together thusly:
My mom had made a huge batch of gochujang-pickled Korean plums.
The plums are pickled first with sugar then marinated for a long time in gochujang, which is Korean pepper paste. The plums themselves are sweet and tart and meld beautifully with the tangy spiciness of gochujang. I’m definitely stealing a jar of this to bring back home.
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My parents’ friends foraged for these leaves on an island off the Eastern coast of the Korean peninsula and gave some to my parents after pickling. I have no idea what these vegetables are called and I have never had them before.
We wrap morsels of rice with them and eat. If you’ve ever had Greek or middle eastern rice-stuffed grape leaves, it kind of tastes like that, except Asian-y and garlicky. In other words, super yumz.
Everything was home-made and not even close to anything I was able to access in America. We just ate these with simple rice. Wonderful.
Here’s to a jetlag-free rest of the day…
