Growing up.

Sunday nights are filled with dread.
My day cannot begin without my cup of coffee.
I say that I'll do things, but I'd really rather not.
I say that it's ok, but it's really not.

I am officially a grown-up.
Talk about things not being all that it's cracked up to be.
By the end of the day, I don't want to do anything.
I don't want to play.
I don't want to talk.
And much to the chagrin of my loyal followers, I don't want to cook.
But because I'm a grown-up, I cooked.

Italian Baked Chicken and Pastina
(courtesy of Giada de Laurentiis)















It was good. Not amazing. But good.
The glass of Zinfandel helped.
I guess enjoying my drink more than my meal was very grown-up of me.

牛丼。

Gyuu-don. (Syn. beef bowl, Yoshinoya)

Dear Yoshinoya patrons in the U.S. of A, you are being gypped.

As anybody who has ever eaten at a Yoshinoya in Japan will tell you, Yoshinoya in America sucks. There's more fat than beef; it's more salty than savory. But the droves of people waiting in line would have you believe otherwise. At C's request, I decided to take another shot at making gyuu-don. (For my first attempt a couple years back, I had made the tragic mistake of making it too salty.)

My recipe is a combination of various recipes, including that of Kurihara Harumi (Japan's answer to pre-ankle-bracelet Martha Stewart). As it is with most Japanese dishes, the ingredients are simple: soy sauce, sugar, mirin, sake, dashi stock, onion and of course, beef. But the simpler the recipe, the more important it is to use quality ingredients. For today's star ingredient - beef, I had to settle for whatever happened to be thinly sliced and packaged at the local market, but Japanese markets usually carry very good beef, tender and appropriately sliced for shabu-shabu, sukiyaki and the like.

Although I can't remember every moment that I enjoyed in Japan, I can recall certain sights, scents, sounds and emotions, even now after all this time. Walking home at night and catching a glimpse of Tokyo Tower peeping from behind my apartment building. The smell of fresh melon-pan from Kobeya Kitchen every morning at the Ebisu JR Station. Barely making it onto the train, only to be standing too close for comfort between a sweaty salaryman and a yamanba adjusting her fake lashes. Exploring the nooks and crannies of Shimokitazawa, while listening to M-flo on my iPod.

If you haven't picked up on it yet, I love Japan.
More specifically, I love Tokyo.
More honestly, I miss Tokyo.
A lot.

김치.

Kimchi - it's what Koreans are made of.

There are many different types of kimchi: bae-chu kimchi (napa cabbage), o-ee so bae gee (cucumber), kkak doo gee (radish/ daikon), and the list goes on. This week, I learned to make bu-chu kimchi (chives) and dong chi mi (radish in water). According to my mom, these two are the easiest to make; minimal discretion involved as far as salting and seasoning are concerned. As much as my mom tries to instill an independent spirit in me, she tries to hand her recipes down to me whenever she has the chance. I think she wants to believe that I will feed my own family homemade kimchi rather than one of the many packaged ones at the Korean markets. Whilst maintaining a full-time professional career, of course.

Washing the chives...

The finished product:
Waiting for the salt to settle in...

The finished product:
And now we wait for it to ferment into smelly, pungent, potent goodness...

Fancy pants.

My mom and her 3 sisters are culinary masters, but with different specialties. I'm obviously biased towards my mom's cooking, which is hard to categorize as she likes to color outside of the lines and concoct her own creations. My 1st aunt is the master of Korean traditional dishes, like various sorts of na-mul (seasonal vegetable side dishes) and dduk mandoo gook (rice cake and dumpling soup); hence, we always have New Year's breakfast at her house. My 2nd aunt is the master of American comfort foods - she lived a long time in Middle America. Her meatloaf, spaghetti sauce and prime rib are all-time popular requests. Christmas dinner is always at her house. My 3rd aunt is my Food Network soul mate. We love the same chefs and swap favorite recipes. She is a master baker: German chocolate cake and banana black walnut loaf, which I intend to make as soon as I get back. She also makes an amazing roasted turkey and an equally amazing roasted veggies. As you may have already guessed, Thanksgiving is always at her place. She, however, has a severe aversion to cilantro and mangoes; that's where we part ways. But for tonight, we decided to join forces to create our fancy pants dinner.

Sliced baguette with honey-butter.

Au gratin potatoes.

Roasted sweet white corn.

Grilled rib-eye steaks, courtesy of my uncle - master of the grill.

Warm spinach salad with a citrus vinaigrette. (My contribution.)

Strawberries with cottage cheese and honey for dessert.

I have read Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club at least a dozen times. I loved it so much that I went on to read all of Tan's other novels, but none of them would move me as much as The Joy Luck Club did. The novel centers around 4 friends who put aside their sorrows and sufferings momentarily to gather around a redwood table and play mahjong while feasting on delicious delicacies. My mom, 2 of my aunts and my uncle hold their very own version of the Joy Luck Club every week. Using my grandpa's old mahjong set, they play for quarters. Once they've collected enough, they use it to pay for a fancy pants meal. This week's fancy pants meal was in honor of my brother and myself as our visit came to a close.

"Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We weren't allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that's how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck."

Hokey pokey.

My sincerest apologies for the recent drought in culinary experimentation. But please bear with me for a little while longer as it is that time of the year again when my meals consist of leftovers from the previous night, and I start using, dare I say it - the microwave oven.

This one, however, doesn't require any sort of radiation: ICE CREAM.

As my loyal followers know, I tend to lean more towards the savory than the sweet. I rarely bake a cake and I don't do chocolate. But ice cream... ice cream makes me weak in the knees. (Except chocolate ice cream, of course.) Once in a while, I come across an ice cream flavor that is inexplicably, indescribably, wonderfully, epically mind-blowing. A few years ago, it was the ever-elusive Green Tea from Häagen-Dazs. This time, it was Hokey Pokey from New Zealand Natural at L.A. Live. (Both flavors which my VONS now carries. I love VONS!) So how do I even begin to describe this to you? There are crystallized balls of butterscotch (yes, CRYSTALS of BUTTERSCOTCH) folded into a honeycomb-flavored ice cream that is thick and creamy and good.

I know, right?

This is probably a good time to say that I also love caramel, butterscotch, toffee and everything else in the "sugar + cream + crack" category. I get that from my dad. And he loves to remind me every time he finds a new pint of ice cream in the freezer, courtesy of yours truly. He doesn't know it, but we actually have much more in common than that, as much as it pains me to admit it. He reads the Korea Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal and msnbc on a daily basis. I check the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and BBC during my study breaks. (This is the basis of our conversations: health care reform, Sarah Palin, Dokdo island, etc.) We're both cynics, critics and conspiracy theorists at heart. He hurts easily, but he's quick to forgive. I'm always on the verge of tears, but I'm just as ready to swallow them. And most importantly, we both appreciate a scoop of honeycomb-flavored ice cream with crystallized balls of butterscotch. I just can't get over it...

Food for thought (courtesy of wikipedia.org): "Before the invention of ice cream cones, ice cream was often sold wrapped in waxed paper and known as a hokey-pokey (possibly a corruption of the Italian ecco un poco - 'here is a little') An Italian ice cream street vendor was called a hokey-pokey man."

Crabs.

My food cravings are very specific. My friends will attest to this. They can range from hard-shell tacos to fried green onion pancakes from Earthen Restaurant. (http://www.yelp.com/biz/earthen-restaurants-hacienda-heights) On this particular Saturday, I was craving steamed Dungeness crab. As evidenced by the existence of my blog alone, I'm not particularly reluctant to make what I want to eat. If I'm craving something, I'll make it or find a restaurant that will make it for me. Even as a party of 1. (I overcame the fear of eating alone in public long ago while living in Tokyo.) So naturally, I made the trek out to the nearest Chinese market for a live Dungeness crab. ($2.99/ lb.!)

In the kitchen is where I find my solace. Not just in the food that I make, but the process - whether it's de-veining shrimp or zesting a lemon. There is something uniquely therapeutic about de-shelling a crab and something inexplicably fulfilling about retrieving a perfectly intact lump of crab meat.

The aftermath:
I obviously didn't think this one through. Usually when I take pictures of my creations, I attempt to create the illusion of a professionally taken photograph with my now-endangered Canon Powershot SD430 (5.0 megapixels!). And usually, I take a picture of the dish before I devour it. I failed on both accounts. Regardless, this party of 1 thoroughly enjoyed the Dungeness crab, along with a glass of Moscato.

The Luck of the Irish.

At the risk of being branded as lush, I dedicate this entry to yet another alcoholic beverage.

Sometimes, grilled cheese and moules frites are just not what I need. Sometimes, what I need is a BJ's Irish Root Beer.
A what? A BJ's Irish Root Beer.

Jameson whiskey + Bailey's Irish Cream + Bols Butterscotch Schnapps + BJ's handcrafted root beer
=
liquid cure for a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

I have a hard time dealing with disappointment. Whether it's finding out that I didn't do as well as I had hoped on an exam. Or my neighborhood's Blockbuster not carrying that obscure foreign film that I wanted to watch. The floodgates open wide and I feel my world shattering into a million pieces as the tears continue to flow in an endless stream. I couldn't explain this phenomenon before, but I'm beginning to think that it has something to do with the fact that I live in a constant state of anxiety, frustration, and anger. Even the slightest disappointment or the smallest departure from my expectations causes all of those emotions to surface.

Today, BP made me mad. Real mad. And all those emotions surfaced again. To make me feel better, BP took me to BJ's for dinner. I ordered the BJ's Irish Root Beer. And everything did become better.

At least for now.