What I had for lunch yesterday...

I went on an apartment tour with a lovely lady from the relocation company yesterday. We looked at full-service apartments, which are kind of like living in a cross between a luxury hotel and a dorm. They have cleaning services and they provide breakfast in a dining room downstairs.

In between looking at places, she took me to lunch at a Korean restaurant and we ate traditional Korean foods. Below is a short list of what I can remember:

• pumpkin soup (hot)
• seawood/soy soup of some kind (cold)
• rice with black beans on pumpkin
• potato noodles with julienned ginger, carrots, green onion
• some sort of jelly thing with vegetables
• potato with a "mild" red pepper sauce
• crab that had been fermented in soy sauce
• green vegetable pickled with soy paste
• green vegetable pickle
• radish pickle
• egg souffle dish
• pork and squid eaten with lettuce (spicy)
• some sort of fish dish -- fermented
• another vegetable pickle
• kimchi
• black beans boiled then fried or baked
• boiled rice (the crispy brown rice from the bottom of the pan boiled with water)
• steamed rice
• miso soup with vegetables
• seaweed soup with oysters (hot)
• iceberg lettuce salad with thousand island type dressing
• white fish in a red sauce
• cinnamon/ginger tea type drink (dessert)
• slice of green apple (dessert)

The majority of the food was spicy. At the end of the meal, I wasn't sure I'd be able to taste anything ever again, and it took a few hours for the roiling volcano in my stomach to calm down.

The seaweed soup had a sort of gelatinous texture, but it was good. It tasted like the outside of a sushi roll. The crab, I tried, but really couldn't eat. Basically, they take a live crab, put it in a bottle, then pour boiling soy sauce over it and let it sit for a few weeks. The edible part ends up being gelatinous in texture. To eat it, you put the cut end of the claw in your mouth, bite down, then suck out the edible part. The jelly sticks were not spicy, and they tasted like whatever else you grabbed with the jelly. So if there were sesame seeds on it, they tasted like sesame. Or like the vegetables. The potato noodles were my favorite, and are apparently a standard western favorite. I think I have the recipe for it somewhere. They weren't spicy either.

The pickled vegetable with soy paste was what I call a stealthy spice dish. It tasted a bit vinegary, then after swallowing, this rush of heat came over me. Made me break out into a sweat. The pork was good, and the first bite wasn't so bad, but the second was definitely sweat inducing. And I even left off the extra red sauce they provided.

The only thing I couldn't bring myself to try was the fermented fish. Not because of the fermented part, but because there were clearly recognizable pepper parts mixed in. Although apparently that's not something that most westerners like.

There was also a white fish dish, which was really tasty. I don't know how they cook their fish here, but I haven't come across a dry fish dish yet. In the US, often I find that fish gets cooked to the point where it's dry, and you have to put some sort of sauce on it to add moisture. But here, the fish comes out very nice and moist.

The boiled rice was also good. They take the browned bits that stick to the bottom of the pan when you cook rice in a pot (not an electric rice cooker), and add water and stir it up until it boils, then serve it.