Fusion dokbokki

I never got sick of eating dokbokki (rice cakes in spicy sauce) on the street. So much so that I even ordered it in a restaurant one night. Our friend Angus took us one of his favorite restaurant districts, Sinsa. Unfortunately the restaurant he wanted to go to was packed, so we walked down the street to an un-tried basement fusion pasta place.

First off, we were the only customers and we were escorted to a curtained "make-out" booth. Being an Asian female with two Caucasian males, maybe our waitress got the wrong idea about me....? Then we realized that the place had no picture or English menus. So the waitress begrudgingly translated each item. When she got to mine -- dokbokki with seafood, I said, oh, that's what I want. She warned me, it's really spicy... but I said that was alright.

It was like some Korean Mediterranean hybrid, full of mussels, shrimp, fish, calamari, crab, and boy was it spicy. The spiciest thing I had in Korea through our whole trip!

Now, I used to say the measure of a developed vs. third-world nation was in their toilet paper and ice cream technology. Well, South Korea is a developed nation and their toilet paper is fine, but what's with the cocktail-sized, single-ply, non-absorbent napkins? Like some sick joke, they have one of the world's spiciest cuisines, worthless napkins, and it's rude to blow your nose at the table! I didn't care, I couldn't help it -- it was a mouth-burning sinus-clearing 7 tissue meal for me!

Best Street Food in Korea

The ubiquitous street food in Korea is dokbokki (rice cake in spicy sauce). Everywhere you looked, you'd find a tarp-covered stall, a big pot of the red stuff, and a Korean woman happy to scoop you up a plastic-bag-lined bowl for you to eat with a toothpick on the sidewalk.

It was perfect sustenance for walking around in the bitter cold - and we had some good, and some not so good bowls of it.

But our revelatory food moment came at a food stand near the Namdaemun market, when we tried this variation of dokbokki, in which the rice cake tube was wrapped in pork sausage, stuck on a stick, and dipped in hot sauce.

It was amazing - by far the best thing we ate in Korea. Absolute perfection on a stick. The best foods are the ones you dream about, and this was definitely it.

Korean Table D'Hote

After Honolulu, redneckhunter and I kept flying across the Pacific to Seoul, Korea to visit friends. Our friend GH has been completely won over by Seoul and thinks Korean food is the best in the world. Strong words coming from a guy who has lived in Thailand and Vietnam!

He took us to a place in the traditional neighborhood of Insadong that served Korean food "table d'hote" style - meaning they bring you dish after dish after dish in a seemingly endless multi-course meal. The idea, he said, is that the table should break under the weight of the food.

Above was a salad to start with dried squid and spicy sauce.

I can't even list all the dishes that came - sashimi, soondubu (tofu stew), fish, vegetables, kimchi.



Redneckhunter loved the bulgogi which was sweet and delicious.

And as if this wasn't enough food, after dinner we went to a shoju bar (one that served fruit infused shoju for such girly drinkers as myself).

Most bars require that you order food if you are going to occupy a table, so we got a great kimchi pajun (pancake) to go with our apple and grapefruit shoju.

Tommy's Italian Sausage, Elizabeth, NJ

Redneckhunter and I went up to Elizabeth to look at a used car. I had never really driven around Elizabeth proper, mostly just gone up to Ikea and never veered that far from the seaport. So it was fun to see all the ethnic places in downtown Elizabeth -- I'm convinced there are hidden gems worth going back for...

But we weren't that hungry and only wanted a snack, so we stopped for a sausage at the famous Tommy's. I thought I might as well get the combo to be able to try both a hotdog and a sausage. This ended up being a much bigger snack than I bargained for! When Tommy asked if I wanted everything on it, I didn't realize this meant not just grilled peppers and onions, but also fried potatoes! I pulled the potatoes off but the sandwich was still ginormous. By the time we got home and built my Ikea dresser, though, I had enough appetite for it...

Girls Cooking Night: Wraps

Last week's Girls Cooking Night theme was things that were wrapped, either in dough or other food wrappers. I made 2 kinds of meat pies. Above are my mom's gali jiao (curry pies). Inside is ground beef and onion with curry, outside is a pie crust-like dough, brushed with egg and baked for 15 minutes or so. I don't make them nearly as pretty as my mom does...

For our other appetizer, Kim made awesome dates stuffed with parmesan then wrapped with bacon - a 3-in-1 wrapper!

For main courses, we had Brownie's Asian chicken lettuce wraps - a lighter interpretation of the concept.

Debbie brought us Middle Eastern-style wrap-your-own-wrappers with chickpeas and cucumbers, and roasted eggplants.

My second type of meat pie were bureks from Eastern Europe -- phyllo dough wrapped and coiled, stuffed with ground beef and onion seasoned with loads of paprika and a little cheese.

Finally Kim and Marian rounded us out with dessert. Kim's ganache sugar cookies didn't end up being wrappable, but were delicious anyway. She brought extra ganache, and when you loaded the cookie up with extra chocolate, it was like an upscale Berger cookie!

Marian's crepes were delicious (though I didn't snap a picture of the crepe itself), but we stuffed them with berries, bananas and her delicious homemade lemon curd.

Rootwoman's Wedding Banquet, Honolulu

What brought us to Honolulu in the first place was rootwoman's wedding. After short and sweet vows outside Iolani Palace, the wedding banquet was held in Chinatown. Here's a rundown of the courses:

Cold dishes to start: char siu, jellyfish, cold pork, and drunk chicken.

Followed by yin-er (silver tree fungus) soup with chicken.

Peking Duck, served not in the traditional bao bing, but in a small mantou. Then Walnut Prawns with XO sauce.

Steamed chicken with bok choy.

Fried oysters (above) with pepper-salt.

Fatty pork with taro.

Braised duck.

And last course, Sweet and sour fish.

Gorgonzola lumpia, Kapiolani Farmer's Market

We tried a number of different snacks when wandering through the Saturday Farmer's Market at Kapiolani Community College, just at the base of Diamond Head, but by far the best thing we ate were these gorgonzola-filled lumpia.

The stand had a variety of lumpia filled with non-traditional ingredients. I wish I remembered the others...

North Shore shrimp truck

This was one of the two places that everyone, and I mean everyone, told me we had to go to when we were on the North Shore of Oahu -- the shrimp guy. (The other being the shave ice place) Well we figured we'd know it when we saw it, and sure enough on the side of the road was this sign:

Not to be confused with the Johnny-come-lately knock-offs, who I noticed all parked closer to the main beaches...

There were 3 types of shrimp plates: scampi (with garlic), spicy, and lemon-butter. Each one came with 12 shrimp and 2 scoops of rice. We opted to share a spicy - it had kick, for sure. But overall, I wondered what the hype was about... It wasn't the experience of the shrimp places in Taiwan, where you fish your own lunch out and have it cooked fresh.

But I suppose before Giovanni's became a tourist destination, there must have been that sense of discovery, of finding something wonderful on the side of the road, of sitting on benches in sandy bathing suits peeling shrimp with salty hands.