As promised, a photoblog of the making of Poor Man's Ddeok-mandu-guk, a mutant version of a traditional Korean New Year's soup (it won't be eaten by most Koreans until Lunar New Year, which is in early February this year). I am your host. All text will refer to the picture below it, unless otherwise stated. Please refer to the previous post for an explanation of Korean terms.
Got all that?
Before we begin, you must make the Yummy Anticipation Face. This is the same face I use to seduce women. Ready? Go!
Thank you. You may return to your normal slack-jawed expression.
Shall we commence the soupefaction?
1. Lay out all ingredients.
See them all?
Are they not beautiful?
Ladies-- when you see that huge onion, do you get the urge to titty-fuck it? I would.
2. Survey your environment. Here, for the first time ever, is a shot of my tiny kitchen. You'll notice I have all the equipment I need to make this soup: nasty-ass hot plate, cutting board, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, a laundry basket (with laundry; the basket's red handles are barely visible at the bottom of the photo), a mysterious electric cord that trails off-camera, an iron in case the soup tries to resist, and dirty dishes.
3. Stick the water on the hotplate. Set the heat to maximum burn. We're aiming for pain, ladies and gentlemen. My clawed hand indicates that you should add the jang-jorim and dashida at this point. Do it, fool. Do not anger the claw.
4. Next-- chop your onions into itty-bitty pieces. Chopping onions is fun and easy. Some of my onion slices were only a molecule thick. In some cultures, such slicing prowess would garner me multiple wives, but I'm in Korea, which means I'm more likely to receive a kick in the anus.
5. Witness the incipient fury as the soup begins to boil. It's already smelling good.
6. Add dem fockin sesame seeds, mon.
7. As I wrote earlier, the ddeok will tend to clump in the package, so it needs to be hand-separated before being plopped into the soup.
8. Below, you see a decent handful of ddeok. Separating the ddeok is easy, and I was surprised-- not to mention relieved-- to discover that I never once had to involve my scrotum in the separation process. Korean food is amazing.
9. OK, so I'm fudging here. The previous handful was kind of wussy, so I'm adding a little extra.
10. The ddeok has gone into the soup at this point, so now I've scrambled an egg. This egg could have grown into a chick, and thence into a chicken. It could have gotten a college degree, started a family, cheated on its wife, hunted elephants in Africa, then written books about the experience. It could have been a very interesting chicken. Instead, it lies dead before you, a pool of yellow-orange goo, little more than edible snot. What a fucking waste. I'm glad I'm not a goddamn chicken.
11. Add black pepper. Koreans call black pepper hu-ch'u, which is great onomatopoeia. You realize, of course, that you're trusting that the powder in this container is black pepper. For all you know, it's cocaine, and I spent my evening totally fucked up.
Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking: Methinks thou art a general offence, and every man should beat thee.
Know what I say to that? Methinks thou shouldst EAT me.
12. As I predicted, the boiling water goes quiet when you plop the mandu in. Heh. Plop. Plop. Plop. Haw haw. Plop. Plop. PLOOP.
13. Whoa-- how about that!? The soup got its erection back! It's dick-flappy happy now! Look at it jump!
14. Quite possibly the most dangerous thing I did this evening was simultaneously pour scrambled egg into boiling soup while taking this photo. The result was poor: instead of the millions of little egg-flecks I'd wanted, I got huge clumps of scrambled egg. I had a hard time controlling the rate of pour-- a critique I've heard from dozens of women. Fuck.
15. The soup boils itself to perfection. If only your pets behaved the same way when boiled.
16. And finally... VOILA! Nirvana in a bowl. Soon to be nirvana in your bowels.
Make the Happy Face now:
17. Next time, make more than one portion, because you never know who might be coming over for dinner.
_
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