Cooking Lessons

A couple of weeks ago Komo made mandu dduk guk--dumpling rice cake soup.  I like this soup anyway, so with Komo's cooking magic added in I was in heaven.  She thought it was funny that I praised it so much; I guess it's not one of the hardest dishes to cook.  She offered to teach me how to make a simple broth to use as a base for many Korean (and Western) dishes. 

So we came over a couple of hours before dinner that weekend, and Komo showed me how to make a simple broth with anchovies and seaweed.  She packed up a baggie of Korean salt (not sure how it differs from salt bought at the commissary) and sent me home with a container of broth.

What to do with it?  I wandered around the commissary picking out ingredients.  Beef is usually good, a couple of potatoes, green onion, a little regular onion...if I had gone to the Korean market I would have grabbed a turnip, but for some reason they never stock them at the commissary.  So I wandered over to the cabbage.  The regular green cabbage looked wilted, the baby bok choy looked good but was way too expensive for cabbage, so I settled on some red cabbage.

I like red cabbage.  I like how it tastes, and I think it's really beautiful.  When I buy red cabbage I always want to do something fun and creative with it, like create a veggie bouquet, or a landscape, or do a photo shoot.

I didn't think about how it would do in soup.

My soup turned out violently purple.  I was kind of expecting it to taste as strange as it looked, but amazingly (perhaps because some of Komo's magic was left in the broth) it was really pretty yummy.

The next weekend we called Komo and Unnie to see if we could come over for dinner, and Komo offered to show me how to make samgyetang--one-pot chicken stew, usually made with ginseng.  I was excited! Samgyetang is really yummy--we ate it at a famous restaurant when Mom was visiting, and it was the only meal where she cleaned her plate.  Or pot, in this case.  I was surprised and excited to learn that it really isn't that complicated to make.  I mean, I think Komo's magic adds something beyond what the ingredients alone would add up to, but watching her cook I was feeling kind of confident that I could kind of reproduce the sequence of events.

photo from iamkoream.com

I haven't tried it yet, even though Komo gave me all of the ingredients I needed.  There's just something about cooking a whole animal that scares me a tiny bit.  Not that I'm opposed to eating whole animals--I'm actually very much a fan--it's just that I've never cooked a whole critter.  Ever.  Not a chicken, not a fish; I even buy shrimp with the heads cut off.  I think I might be a little afraid that I'll forget to take something out that will make the whole dish taste bad, or that I'll accidentally eat a shrimp head...oh wait, that was Daniel in Incheon.  Anyway, I'm still working up the nerve.

Tonight I made myself a reuben sandwitch with rye bread that Jihyun Unnie bought me and an apple cobbler with apples that Kyoungmin Unnie gave me.  (Noticing a theme?  Our family here spoils us tremendously.)  Not as impressive as samgyetang, but pretty darn yummy.  Perhaps I'll tackle the scary whole chicken the next time I cook for Mike.