yesterday's luncheon

This past Friday's luncheon, a delayed celebration of July 4th, was a massive festival of carbs. I served burgers, dogs (with chili; the boss brought sauerkraut), pulled-pork hoagies, honey-Dijon kettle chips, "baked" beans (actually done on a stove), coleslaw, Toll House chocolate-chip cookies, and bread pudding. Except for me, the crew concentrated on the burgers and dogs. The hot dogs came in all shapes and sizes: I had a leftover package of standard, American-style hot dogs (Korean brand, but legit American in style); the boss had four left-over Kirkland pork dinner franks that had been sitting in our freezer for months; I also had a package of hefty Korean "grill franks." I had a Kirkland frank, but it tasted weird, maybe from being in the freezer for too long.

The crew also ignored the coleslaw, the bread pudding, pulled pork, and cookies, so for them, this was exclusively about the burgers and dogs. My Korean coworker once again tried some weird-ass combination of toppings that apparently didn't quite work out for him, but as he was leaving for the day, he told me he'd eaten too much, which I always take as a compliment. How much of the meal was actually my cooking, though, is up for discussion: I had bought the burger and dog buns, the hoagies, the chips, the cheese, the sauces and trimmings, the hot dogs (except for the Kirkland ones—the boss had bought those), and other things. In terms of what I myself made, I made the cookies, bread pudding, burger patties (spiced and seasoned Kevin-style), pulled pork, chili, and baked beans in their final form. You'd think that burgers and dogs, etc., would be a simple and straightforward meal to prep, but in actuality, there are a lot of moving parts, and prep took a long time, requiring me to ferry food to the office a couple times so as not to weigh myself down by taking it all at once (an impossible job). We now have enough leftovers to last us through next week. I came in to the office yesterday (Saturday) and started the process of whittling down the leftovers, but as I said at the beginning, this was a carb fest, and I could tell that two days of carb-bingeing was taking its toll on my heart: by last evening, the Angina Fairy was knocking at my door again. I had my nitro pills with me this time, but I didn't use them, instead opting to just rest a few minutes on a random bench in Daechi Station before heading the rest of the way down to the subway platform. Today, I've been dry-fasting (no food, no liquids, no nothing), and it feels good. 

What follows is a photo essay of prep and the meal.

The bread pudding was an afterthought. I'd been racking my brains, thinking of a way to get rid of some leftover custard from when I'd taken that "carnivore" bread and turned it into French toast (see here for a reminder). Then it hit me: bread pudding! Typically, bread pudding is made with stale bread, but you can quickly simulate this by taking fresh bread, cubing it, and baking it for a while in your oven, effectively drying it out. The bread then absorbs the custard, but the top layer retains a measure of dryness that then becomes crispy when you bake the assembled bread pudding.

I'd opted to use up my remaining dried cranberries, too. I sprinkled them on top, but this turned out to be a mistake. The bread pudding smelled amazing as it baked (I'd also drizzled a stick's worth of melted butter all over the top of the pudding), but when it came out, the cranberries all looked as if they'd been through hell. I ended up plucking them all off the finished product.

The over-baked cranberries tasted bitter.

Tiny corpses, all piled up.

I see a berry or two still hiding among the bread cubes.

Can you see all three types of hot dog? The boiling liquid, by the way, is half beer.

These burger patties, a combination of skirt steak and brisket, don't look impressive, but they were awesome.

I reheated them the old-school way to minimize fluid loss. In a microwave, juices come flowing out.

bread pudding again, waiting to be eaten

The East Asian notion of bacon follows neither the "streaky bacon" (to use the British term) nor the "back bacon" template. It looks as though the pork had been cut up into pieces, then pressed back together into a jigsaw-puzzle-patterned brick, then sliced as if it were regular pork belly. Taste-wise, it tastes recognizably like regular American bacon, but with the fat and muscle distributed seemingly randomly through each slice, the texture is somewhat different. I don't mind it, but it is surpassingly strange. I prepped a pile of bacon for the burgers:

Korean bacon. I should have taken a picture of these when they were raw.

I had ordered some Bush's baked beans for the luncheon, but they weren't scheduled to arrive in time, so I made do with the no-name brand beans sold at my local grocery. The beans got the standard treatment: mustard, brown sugar, chili flakes, and lardons of thick-cut bacon (which does look like standard pork belly). It only recently occurred to me that the reason baked beans are sold at all in Korean groceries is that they're sometimes used in making budae-jjigae. Duh! All these years, and I'd never put two and two together.

Below is a shot of the beans with some trimmings:

Of note: pickles (bottle), beans, tomatoes, lettuce, coleslaw.

And the beans get their own food-porn closeup. No one ate them but me.

Below: honey-Dijon kettle chips (which were awesome), hot-dog buns, shamefully small wheat hoagie rolls (that I'll never buy again—they're the brown ones on the plate), hamburger buns (still bagged up, lower shelf), and way off to the left, some cheese.

The hamburger buns come from John Cook Deli Meats; I ordered them through Coupang. I've loved these buns since I first encountered them years ago. They're machine-made like every other brand's buns, but when you first open up that plastic bag, there's a pleasant blast of a yeasty aroma that reminds you of a bakery. I like these burger buns way better than the ones produced by Shilla Bakery and sold at Costco. Those buns aren't horrible, but they're no match for the seductive, dark-side Force powers of John Cook's buns.

Below, a quick focus on the cheese: American and "Normantal," which I guess is a portmanteau of Normandie and Emmental. Emmental cheese (also spelled "Emmenthal") is what we Amurricans usually call "Swiss cheese," a term that inadvertently implies the Swiss make only one type of cheese, which is ridiculous. Like France, Switzerland is a chocolate/cheese powerhouse. Normantal is likely a French variant of Emmental.

The holes in the Normantal are smaller, more modest.

Below is hot-dog chili, i.e., runny chili with no beans, meant to be easily spread over a hot dog by a hot-dog vendor working a mile a minute to fulfill orders. That's why it looks liquidy despite the inclusion of a little cornstarch to thicken the liquid up a bit. The chili gave me a chance to use up the rest of the salsa from way back when I'd made nachos for the crew. You can see the flecks of chili peppers in there. And the chili looked less liquidy once I stirred it.

just out of the microwave

My pride and joy: the Toll House cookies:

a batch is always about 35-ish cookies

My other pride and joy was the pulled pork. This was an especially awesome batch that combined two different cuts of pork, one of which was the standard pork shoulder (I can't remember the other, but it was solid meat like a pork tenderloin). After seven hours in the slow cooker (no post-cook broiling this time around), the meat was ready to just flake apart. I sauced it thoroughly but not overly, et voilà:

First burger of the day for me:

I quickly microwaved the burger, cheese, and bottom bun. Top bun had mayo, so no microwave.

I'd remarked earlier that microwaving burger patties can chase out all the juices. I had instead heated the patties up (90 grams each, pre-cooking) in a skillet. But the boss got to the office a bit late, and everything had cooled down a bit by the time he arrived, so I told everyone that the patties would need only about 30 seconds at high in the microwave. I had done these almost like smash-burger patties, and 90 grams is barely three ounces. Still, nobody took the dare to create a double burger. That would've been something. Maybe I'll do that next week with the remaining patties. Anyway, with skirt steak not being a very fatty cut, microwaving didn't do as much damage as I'd thought it might.

Another angle. Note the Normantal.

In honor of my Korean coworker and his strange tastes, a chili-kraut dog:

'twas good, but the dog's taste was a bit strange, maybe from freezer burn

Round 2 saw me with a pulled-pork hoagie and beans.

These kettle chips were awesome.

I still can't figure out my Korean coworker. He said he didn't want the kettle chips because they "had a strong taste." You'd think a weirdo like him would like that.

My second burger, below, was a protein celebration: beef, bacon, and pulled pork! When I was a kid, our family would occasionally eat at the Roy Rogers burger chain, and my childhood fave was the "Double-R Bar burger." This was a cheeseburger with a pile of deli-shaved ham, topped with a healthy amount of barbecue sauce. I haven't had such a burger in years, but the happy concoction you see below faintly reminded me of the Double-R Bar:

My protein burger also had BBQ sauce on the bottom bun, mayo on the top bun, and veggies for trimmings: pickles, lettuce, and tomatoes:

Another angle:

And here's my slice of bread pudding:

Without a doubt, I gained weight and set my blood sugar back about a year. It's going to take some effort to recover from the shock of all this, but we still have to get through some leftovers. What I might do is prep a large tray of sandwiches and sides with the remaining food, then put the tray on the conference table in the office down the hall for all the young staffers to swarm to and eat. I have to find better methods for dealing with unhealthy leftovers than just eating the leftovers myself. This behavior turns a cheat day into a cheat week, and the numbers don't lie. Now, in particular, it's important to behave better because I no longer have the "support" of all those extra meds to tamp down my blood pressure, etc. I wanted to be free of meds, and now I mostly am, which is scary because it means I henceforth need real self-discipline: I can no longer hide behind chemicals.

This is the test.

But, damn, Friday was a good day! I hadn't eaten like that in a while. At least I enjoyed the coleslaw, pulled pork, cookies, and bread pudding.

Next huge meal: Thanksgiving.

In the meantime, I'll be doing tamales and tacos in August, then Alfredo gnocchi in September. I might have to skip the special meal altogether in October since I'll have my doctor's appointment on October 15, after which I'll immediately skip down to Busan to start my 3-week walk. So: a Thanksgiving meal in November, then a Christmas meal in December, and that'll wrap up this tumultuous 2024.

EPILOGUE: I'm glad no one else ate the bread pudding at lunch. It tasted great, but the texture was all wrong—too chewy—probably because I'd stored it in a Ziploc bag all night and most of the next day, allowing the bread to go from crunchy to elastic. I took the remaining 3/4 of the bread pudding back home with me and blasted it for a few minutes with the broiler... instant improvement. So there's no point in serving bread pudding elsewhere if you don't have the means to broil it on site so as to bring it back to life. Guess I'm eating the rest of the pudding myself. Darn the luck!