meat, cabbage, rice, friendship

Today, I was able to treat myself to an afternoon indulging in one of the great loves of my life.  Many people are surprised when they learn about this particular fixation of mine, though the better they know me, the less out of character it seems.  Those who know me best just nod, thinking to themselves, "yes, this is right.  this is perfectly consistent with who he is, and who he has always been."

I went to a Korean restaurant.  I am a great food lover, a true gourmet, and of all the fine cuisines available on this green earth, that which hails from the Korean peninsula has earned my fervent devotion so many times over that all others seem to pale in comparison.

My food journey is a long and arduous one.  As a youth, I didn't really know there was such a thing as good food.  I understood that there were some restaurants which were 'fancy', where people spent exorbitant sums to eat food, but since all food was just food, I assumed they just did it as a status symbol, not for any special taste.  My favorite things to eat were sweets, because they were the most flavorful!  It was not a healthy way to live.

In college, my eyes were opened by some very concerned friends, and I learned how good food can really be.  I gradually became more and more selective in my food choices, though I still yearned for sweets.  Before long, the common grub of the hoi polloi could no longer interest me, and now I ensure that all my meals are filled with aromatics, complex flavor interactions, and masterfully cooked and crisped meats.

It's only in the last year or so that I've been able to really leave the addiction to sweets behind, and I give the majority of the credit for that to my discovery of the magnificence of Korean food.

Korean cuisine is sweet, but not too sweet.  It's savory, but not overwhelmingly savory.  It's salty, but not brackish.  It has sour elements, but they're never the centerpiece.  And it's amazingly, wonderfully, gloriously, haphazardly spicy.

This article by Michelle Zauner (a musician who performs under the name Japanese Breakfast) approaches Korean cuisine with the same sense of intimacy and comfort that I do, though we have wildly different reasons for feeling that way.  In fact, I'd guess that she'd probably be annoyed by my familiarity and appreciation for it, as I'm clearly a johnny-come-lately to this party, and an obnoxious white guy to boot.  But she gets to the bottom of what sets it apart:  the variety and intensity of the dishes mandate a special care that other cuisines can't get away with.  The food so quickly becomes an expression of yourself, as it takes on the character you give it in the cooking process.  It's a coming-together of the finest kind, a culinary Zusammenbringen.  

Since I've started cooking my own Korean food, learning all the different ingredients, hunting them down in Korean supermarkets, teaching myself the right ways to use the various sauces and spices, researching the unusual cooking techniques and implements, I've found more and more ways to improve my cooking all around.

Last week at work, a coworker and I learned that another coworker had never had kimchi.  We resolved then and there to throw a kimchi party.  On Thursday, we each brought in a jar of our favorite kind of kimchi.  I also brought in an electric skillet and some Korean-style marinated beef (bulgogi) and a rice cooker.  We had an authentic Korean meal, the three of us sitting in an empty office together, sharing our Korean food, listening to Korean music, talking about what's so great about it and just enjoying each other's company.  None of us are Korean, and of course that doesn't matter at all.  The food was a unifying force for all of us, and we went away from that meal feeling closer than ever.

고마워.