I went with my friend Michelle for 삼계탕 (samgyetang, or chicken ginseng soup) again the other day after our quiz in class, and it did not disappoint here's my bowl, which you can't tell from the picture, but it comes out in a rolling boil:
Yes, that is a whole little chicken (like a cornish game hen) all up in my soup! It's stuffed with Korean sticky rice, what I think are jujubes, and that stick coming out is the ginseng, all of which is so tender and you just eat it all. You have another small bowl for taking out pieces of the chicken and rice and taking out the bones - I can debone that sucker with my chopsticks like a pro now, but it helps that the meat just falls off the bone. I'm already planning when I'll eat this again before I have to leave next week.
Another delight was this abalone rice porridge, which sounds kind of crazy, I know, but porridges here are savory and flavorful. This one was only about $5 at a small shop we stopped at on our lunch break near Sogang University:
Well, I've been lucking out pretty well in the food arena lately, so I was bound to come across a couple disasters eventually. The first was at this chain restaurant called Paris Baguette, which is EVERYWHERE, as in you can't walk 3 blocks without passing another one. Their stuff is trying to be European, but it definitely has the whole "east meets west" kind of thing going on, and not on purpose. I've never seen most of the stuff there in Europe or the States. My mistake there was getting something that was called "pizza bread", as I needed just a snack, not a full meal. With that name, you have a few expectations, like tomato sauce, cheese, maybe some toppings. Well, it had some sort of tomato sauce - closer to ketchup, to be honest - and a couple chunks of pineapple and black olives, and some weird-looking cheese. However, upon first bite, it tasted so weird. The cheese melted in my mouth and had a gross flavor. When I inspected it, I discovered the deceit: the "cheese" was actually mayonnaise baked onto it to look like cheese. There is little in this world I abhor more than mayonnaise, and mayonnaise in disguise is just plain rude.
This was another mistake:
This is a sweet rice drink called shikhye, which they've served to us in the cafeteria and I really liked. It's kind of like horchata, but not so milky. The canned version: 2 unenthusiastic thumbs waaay down. I guess canned anything will be a million times worse than the real stuff. I was bound to be burned by something sooner or later.
2 comments:
The soup looks and sounds delicious!! Do you think that your Korean restaurant in Provo has it? EEWW!!! Ketchup and baked mayo on what you thought was Pizza! Can't even imagine what it tasted like--especially when your taste buds were expecting cheese!
That whole chicken with the ginseng looks really good. We should get that at a Korean takeout place-would they have that here? I love mayonaise on practically everything-but that disguised one does not sound good at all!
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