I quite like food. This is not really a secret given that I look like I like my food, which is great because, as I just said, I like my food. Over the past two years I have developed a great liking for Korean food, probably a good thing given I live in Korea (and because, just to reiterate again, I like food). If I had to name a favourite dish, amongst the many great dishes that tempt the tastebuds here, I would have to say it is the humble bibimbap, a dish that translates literally as mixed rice (bibim = mixed and bap = rice).
To the uninitiated, bibimbap may just look like a bowl of rice and thinly sliced vegetables. But to those who have experienced bibimbap, it is much more complex. It is the subject of its own musical (Nanta), it is a dish that was worthy of being served to royals, it is served as plane food and it even gets to go on spaceships ((Jeonju bibimbap (Jeonju is the capital city of South Korea's North Jeolla Province), famous because it is considered the home of bibimbap (its secret to success is the cooking of the rice in beef broth, its use of regional ingredients and the fact that around thirty different ingredients are contained in one bowl of deliciousness, is an authorised food provider for astronauts, including Mars explorers)! I suspect it is also a dish worthy of many a grand love story. Is there a Korean drama that does not contain at least one scene of an angsty love-ridden couple (driven apart by parents/work/life circumstances only to have found each other years later thanks to Naver and a chance meeting at one of the thousand coffee shops next to the subway station that they both get on at) staring into each others eyes as they methodically mix their bibimbap? I think not. Who could not help but fall in love with another over a dish of thinly sliced vegetables, in a pleasing array of colours, perfectly placed on top of generously sesame oiled up rice? Proof is provided by an American-Korean friend who confessed to me (and a carload of other Korean-Americans as we sped down the Gangnam Expressway on our way, conveniently, to eat bibimbap) that her husband fell in love with her because of how she ate her bibimbap - apparently very quickly (the eating that is, not the love, which has continued).
My own flirtation with bibimbap has developed (matured could be a more appropriate word but that would be admitting that I may have been immature in the first place) in the two years I have been here. At first, I didn't appreciate the subtlety and the complexity of the dish. I saw only carrots and cucumbers, some stringy mushrooms, a raw egg and rice. And I saw them separately. Oh, how wrong was I. Bibimbap is a dish that comes with a need - to be stirred with chopsticks prior to eating (I am told that direction does not matter but you must jumble up and around without squishing the rice). The mixture is crucial because the whole point of this seemingly simple dish is to blend the yin and the yang - to achieve a perfect harmony of five colours (red, green, yellow, white and black which represent the five elements (tree, earth, fire, water and gold)) and five flavours (sweet, salt, savoury, spicy and bitter). Achieving this harmony can only be done when you mix.
For the past two years I have fought against the mixing. If you are my husband you would most likely link my aversion to stirring to some obsessive, controlling personality trait and you would also throw in something about me having severe subjugation issues but I say he reads too much into it (we are talking about bibimbap here, not marriage). However, I do now acknowledge that I have not been doing myself any favours by, sometimes aggressively, refusing to stir, particularly because not stirring can cause great angst to the people who deliver the bibimbap. Here is an interaction I have had several times now with Bibimbap Man at Namdaemun Market:
Me: Order bibimbap in very bad Korean (which basically exists of pointing at the picture of bibimbap on the menu and adding a very feeble please in Korean).
Bibimbap Man: Yells order back at me, walks off and returns a few minutes later to laden the table with Korean condiments and, a few minutes after that, brings me a most excellent bowl of super goodness, aka bibimbap.
Me: Start prodding at the bowl with chopsticks (my chopstick proficiency is just slightly higher than my Korean language level).
Bibimbap Man: After watching me from afar, sighs very loudly, hastily heads towards me, grabs my chopsticks and starts to mix.
Me: Decisively but not quite aggressively (more like the zeal of a random adjuma energetically and emphatically zipping up an undone jacket on one of my children), grab chopsticks back off him and say "It's OK" (this is one of my few and very well used phrase in Korean) but Bibimbap Man either does not understand my stab at the impossibly hard Korean language or chooses not to hear me and keeps stirring, looking at me like I am offending the entire restaurant by not doing so. "Why no stir?" he asks me with his eyes.
Me: "I like having the ability to choose when to stir and what to stir", I say back (although, because I have to say this in English it is not understood and I am getting nowhere).
Bibimbap Man: Throws chopsticks back at me in disgust and orders me out of shop to never return again. "If you do not stir your bibimbap, you will eat no bibimbap", I hear him say (although given I can't speak Korean he could have also said to me "Thanks for coming and you look lovely today" but somehow I think not).
But that was before, in a life I now refer to as "Life: Pre-Bibimbap."
Life: Pre-Bibimpap was a time when I did not eat kim (seaweed), rice was an after thought to the meal and consumed maybe once a fortnight, I would not drink lukewarm green tea as an accompaniment to the meal and I was utterly useless when it came to sharing dishes (you might call it selfish but if I ordered one dish off the menu than that was the one, and only, dish that I wanted to eat). And I would never have brought gochujang (fermented, red chile paste) to add to my dishes.
We went home to Australia for Christmas and three weeks without any Korean food proved to be a real challenge (although we travelled home to Australia with kim. I ate it all (yes, ALL) the day we arrived). The day after we arrived back to Korea I dropped the kids off at school and went straight to our local orange fronted store (kind of like your local bakery) and ate a steaming hot bowl of Kimchi jjigae (kimchi stew) and that night I added gochujang to my pesto pasta (what is a bowl of pesto pasta without gochujang? It is nothing I tell you - nothing!). The next day, friends from Australia came to visit, (super lovely people and I would highly recommend them to anyone as house guests, especially because on day three they bought a karaoke machine so we had norebang at our house every night. Word of warning - they slightly rigged the machine as there is no way Linda Brown (not her real name (ok so it might be) top scored with a 95 for a Billy Joel song!!! I played tour guide and, because I was so excited about being back in the land of fermented bean paste and red pepper sauce and because they love eating, their two week visit basically became a food lovers guide to Seoul.
Here is a sample of the food we consumed.
Kimchi, mandu, kimchi, pickled daikon, kimchi, pork chop chey noodles, hoddeok (korean doughnut filled with sweet cinnamon sauce and crushed peanuts), fried chicken, udon noodles, donkatsu (fried pork), korean bbq, more korean bbq, mexican (pulled pork kimchi fries were a favourite), margaritas, Cass beer, kimbap, tacos, the whole desert bar at Top Cloud restaurant, breakfast burgers from the school cafeteria, pancakes and hash browns, liquid nitrogen ice-cream, spun honey, corn in a cup, on the cob, from a can (our friends are corn addicts), frozen yoghurt, salted caramel pecan popcorn, hot chocolate, mint hot chocolate, caramel hot chocolate, vanilla hot chocolate (any variety of hot chocolate), honey bread, chocolate bread, pomegranates, boxes, boxes, boxes and boxes of Jeju mandarines, grapes, grapes and more grapes. And bibimbap.
Of course, I took them to eat the very Korean meal of bibimbap. Pretending to be totally all over life in South Korea, I explained that the dish must be mixed. Because I was on a high (most likely because of all the food we were consuming during our two week orgy of Korean goodness) I decided I was also ready to mix (and also because I did not wanting to appear hypocritical). My chopsticks clumsily jumbled all the ingredients up together, the gooey egg dissipating yellowness throughout the bowl, the carrots mixing with the mushrooms, mixing with the cucumbers, the gochujang, lavishly heaped on top, staining the white rice red as I mixed. The result? As has been my experience with most Korean dishes I have eaten (with the exception of live octopus), there can be no turning back. While this does not translate to me ceding any control or authority (to husband anyway - let's not get catrried away with ourselves just yet), it does mean that I can go back to Bibimbap Man and agree to let him vigorously mix my bowl of goodness because life post-bibimbap (stirred) is a happy, happy place. Shame for my friends that they had to leave. I'm not sure I ever can.
No comments:
Post a Comment