the "Ave, Joel!" foodblog

The story of Joel's peanut brittle, told with candor on his blog here and here and here, continues on my blog now that Joel's package has arrived from Gunsan.

The above sign, stuck on my door sometime Friday evening while I was out, says, "A registered package arrived and is being held by the concierge office." I like how neatly it's written: this is the "Carefully printed so the foreigner can understand" font. Actually, I appreciate that. Korean cursive is a pain to read.








The concierge last evening, a rather goofy fellow, kept speaking to me in deliberately broken Korean: "Package! Gunsan! Gunsan my hometown! When I was waaaa-waaa (i.e., sound of a baby crying), I was in Gunsan! Good!" While my Korean's got years to go before it's truly proficient, I know I speak better than that. It could simply be that the guy is used to dealing with the other foreigners in our building who can't speak much Korean at all.

As you see above, the box of goodies arrived via postal t'aek-bae delivery. I've blotted out Joel's and my contact information, lest any born-again Christians get funny ideas.








I opened the package downstairs and gave a small bag of Joel's peanut brittle to the adjoshi, who dubbed it yeot, a traditional Korean candy, after I was unable to produce the expression "peanut brittle" in Korean. What is the Korean expression for peanut brittle? Ddang-k'ong yeot? Probably not. The problem is that yeot, while a close approximation, doesn't quite capture the brittleness of peanut brittle. (By the way, I'm a huge fan of yeot.)

Above, we see into the already-opened box, minus the brittle I gave the goofy dude.








Above: your first glimpse of the glory to come. You can see the words "2nd batch" in magic marker on the clear plastic bag. I assume that "1st batch" went to the concierge downstairs.








YES! The brittle is MINE!








And here's the final shot of the brittle, laid out on a large plate. Joel, this is damn good. I know you don't want to accept any money, but you probably could get away with selling this to expats in Korea for a decent price. Just something to think about.

And now for something completely different:








The baguette version of the tuna-on-crackers snack I'd made before. Totally irrelevant to the peanut brittle, but I didn't want to do a separate foodblog post about it.

Thanks again, Joel!

And a quick note to Max: I wish I'd thought to take a series of pics after your wife's care package arrived. I regret not having done that, and I've slaughtered most of the contents of that package. Sorry, man.


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