fud pix

Some of what I've been cooking and ordering lately:

Above is a plate of pan-fried mandu with home-made sweet gochujang sauce. I was lucky enough to find a fairly cheap one-kilo bag of frozen mandu, which I then used in soups and ate steamed before frying the remaining dumplings up. Easy does it with the oil: manudpi (mandu skin) is delicate, and crisps up quickly in the pan. No need for full-on heat.

Below: I threw some of the 30 eggs I had bought into the pan, scrambling them by piercing the yolks with my spatula and stirring desultorily. Eggs are, of course, Atkins-friendly, and much of what is said about the dangers of their cholesterol content amounts to myth (for more on that, read Gary Taubes's Why We Get Fat, which I talked about here).


Below, an attempt at re-creating a dish I'd made before: pan-fried honeyed ddeok. I had no honey on hand, but I did have a mess of brown sugar, which I mixed with water and microwaved to make a simple syrup. Not quite the result I was looking for, but cooking the ddeok was still hypnotizing: I could almost convince myself that these were seared scallops. Stare long enough at the image and you'll see what I mean.


Below, we see the benefits of having a cell phone. This is my very first order-in meal, from a place called Two-Two Chicken. The restaurant specializes in something called pa-dak (i.e., onion chicken), and while I don't particularly like onions, I saw, on the establishment's ad, that these were green onions, and that they were piled atop the chicken in an easily removable way. As you see below, I had already removed most of the onions:


Two-Two Chicken doesn't deliver as far as CUD campus, dammit—at least, they didn't on the day I called them. For W16,000, I get almost twice the amount of chicken that I'd get by ordering from their rival BBQ Chicken, which is the place I order from while on campus. But there's a quantity/quality trade-off: BBQ Chicken's chicken tenders are made from chicken tenderloin, which is basically white meat blessed by God—super-soft, super-moist, despite all the deep-frying. Two-Two Chicken swings more Chinese, preferring smallish chunks of dark meat (with all that that implies regarding the possibility of encountering bits of gristle in a random bite). Dark meat is arguably more flavorful, but I've never been a fan of it. Breast and tenderloins are where it's at for me (and I apply the same sensibility to women!).

So that's a quick tour of the food I've been making and eating recently. Nothing particularly healthy, but then again, I haven't photographed everything I've been eating.


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