Korea!!! (NEVER AGAIN WILL I COOK KOREAN FOOD)

Both The Republic of Korea (South) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North) joined the UN on September 17th, 1991.

FINALLY!!!  A meal in a different region of the world!  We were SO excited.  Also, it's Korean food, heeeeeeeeey!

I had trouble deciding, so I chose a couple easy dishes.  Unlike Amber, who chose one RIDICULOUS recipe.

Though the recipes were simple, finding the ingredients was a challenge.  It took me 3 days and 4 grocery stores to find what I needed.

I decided to prep the toasted walnuts in apricots a day early.  First, I decided to shell my own walnuts.  Don't do what I did.  Go to the store, and buy pre-shelled walnut halves like the lazy American you are, because... What A Pain.  How does anyone extract an intact walnut half from the laberyth that is a walnut shell is beyond me.  After shelling 30 walnuts, this is how many halves (and "almost" halves) I got.

Then (Mother Almighty) I had to roll them up in dried apricot.  Doesn't sound hard, but IT IS.  First you have to get those sticky things to lay flat, then cut them square and lay them together despite their best efforts to stay adhered to your hands, then somehow roll that sticky mess up.

It was MISERABLE!  Two ingredients and several hours later I completed the following:

NEVER AGAIN WILL I WRAP WALNUTS IN APRICOTS.

While I was peeling apricots off myself Amber was kind enough to call to ask how much spicy was too spicy for me.  My friends know I'm a spicy wimp, so I appreciated her asking.  The peppers she held up to the screen didn't look too intense, so I gave the go ahead to follow the recipe.

Day of, packed up, and headed over.

I had bought way too much sweet potato, so I ask how much I should prepare, to which Jenny responded, "ALL OF IT!"  Why did I listen?

I chop it up and started frying... and frying... and still frying.  Finally I had to let my sous-chef (Bryan) take over so I could get to work on my other tasks.

Meanwhile, Amber and Jenny are stirring up a zillion small dished for the bibop?  bimbobap?  Bibimbap.  I watched her taste the dish I had permitted peppers to be added to the day before, and listened to her yell, "WOW that's hot".  The peppers didn't look that crazy on my tiny cellphone screen.  Based on her reaching, I steered clear of that dish.

So next I made the sugar coating for the Candied Sweet Potato.

WTF.

So there's a VERY short period of time between when the sugar is soft enough to coat your potato in, and when it hardens in to a ROCK HARD piece of caramel.  Did I know this?  No.  But I found out pretty quick when it hardened in the pan and on the spoon, and NOT mind you, on the potato.  Not fully understanding what was happening, I turned around and begged for help, but it was too late.  I thought about trying again, but everyone agreed that we would be happy just eating un-candied deep fried sweet potato.

Though it was fun to take turns breaking off pieces of some delicious caramel, I never what to try to candy coating anything again.

Cooking has been a bit of a struggle so far but the last thing to do was to fry the rice patties.  How hard could that be?  I mix the batter, pat it into a disk and fry it.  The recipe says "press down" so I take my spatula and press.  When I lift it up again my pan is empty.  It's empty because the rice patty is now adhered surprisingly well to the back of the spatula.

<sigh>

Never again will I try to make these stupid little rice patties.

I'm usually pretty good at reigning in my tornado-like cooking style of getting everything everywhere, but not this time.  With all the speed bumps in my recipes I was at the end of my rope, and I felt like I needed to buy my friends a new kitchen because I destroyed theirs.

Finally got it done, and it was dinner time!

Master Rice Fluffer

Master of Rice-Colored Fluffness

In addition to all that food there were a few Korean alcoholic beverages available.  I brought Makgeolli (MAHK-oh-lee), which is a rice liquor, which lead me to Korean drinking etiquette:

"Each diner is expected to face away from the eldest male and cover his mouth when drinking alcohol. According to Hyang Eum Ju Rye, the drinking etiquette established in Choseon Dynasty, it is impolite for a king and his vassal, a father and his son, or a teacher and his student to drink face to face. Also, a guest should not refuse the first drink offered by host, and in the most formal situations, the diner should politely refuse twice a drink offered by the eldest male or a host. When the host offers for the third time, then finally the guest can receive it. If the guest refuses three times, drink is not to be offered any more."

Suffice to say, for the rest of the evening everyone was covering their mouth and looking away form Bryan (the oldest, and only male at the dinner).

Hilarious.

After dinner was dessert.  It was weird.  Bean paste filled doughnuts and baked sweet rice somethings.  I rather enjoyed the weirdness, but opinions were across the board.

Everything was delicious.  If you've never had Korean food, you should try it.  However, I, personally, will be walking to the nearest Korean restaurant because I WILL NEVER COOK KOREAN FOOD AGAIN.

(Celebrated January 6th, 2018)