Grandmom's 88th!

We visited my grandma to celebrate her 88th birthday. Whoa man, 88 is pretty damn old! A variety of korean foods in fancy aluminum pans. I forget where my mom picked this food up from, but it was actually pretty damn good. Later that night, we trekked to my aunt's house for some more food. She had these freakishly ginormous shrimp. She didn't realize that she didn't have any normal tempura batter, so she ended up having to use this spicy chicken batter. These were so big she could only fry up a few at a time. There's my hand for scale. They really were pretty much as big as my hand. I don't have the biggest hands, but they're quite normal sized. These shrimp were huge. The chicken batter ended up being fine. It's hard to screw up fat giant shrimp being fried in a hot vat of grease. We would be terrible koreans if we didn't bbq some meat. We would have grilled outside but it was storming something terrible, so we had to resort to using an indoor grill. In addition to meat and shrimp, we also had some spicy fish soup.

Free Chipotle

What's better than a chipotle burrito? Well, lots of things. But really, what's better is a free chipotle burrito! While digging through all the mail that had accumulated from my trip, I found a random free coupon. And man, it totally worked. I definitely enjoy me some free burritos!

Holiday Eating!

Christmas is usually held at my aunt's house in delaware, but we had a change of plans this year. It was at my mom's house, yes, where I grew up. No ham or turkey here folks, just good old-fashioned korean fare.
The spread. Ain't it beautiful?

My aunt fried up some shrimp tempura. Ok, so that's not korean, it's japanese, but hey, it's still tasty. How do these shrimp not curl up when fried? It's a secret. And now I know the secret!

Mrs. K made us a batch of these little pancakes. Not typical of what we would normally eat, as these were made up with ground mung beans, cabbage, and some other stuff. Quite mild, yet delicious.

What's this weird gelatenous stuff on this plate? It's muk. I'm not sure what kind of muk, whether it's made from acorn starch, or buckwheat starch, or mung bean starch, but it's some kind of korean muk. It's jello-esque in texture, but still not. Hard to describe. The muk itself essentially has no flavor. So you have to adulterate with something. Here, my mom has just doused with some sort of soy sauce based nonsense, green onions, and eventually, after this photo was taken, some crushed up nori sheets. I know it's a strange concept, but I dig this stuff.

Grilled squid on the left, and some kind of grilled long skinny fish on the right. Both marinated with some spicy shizz.

A close up of the squid. Beautiful, isn't it? It's painstakingly scored in both horizontal and vertical directions. Why? I have no idea. I think it has to do with how it always curls when cooked, but it's also because it looks so bad ass.

Some spicy pork ribs.

My aunt made some galbi jim, or korean braised short ribs. A family holiday gathering certainly isn't worth anything if it doens't involve stuffing your face with good homemade eats.

Not Very Traditional Thanksgiving

My family doesn't really do much for thanksgiving. It's never been a big holiday for us, and we've never really gotten together with extended family for it. At least not for at least 15 years. This year wasn't much different. Just my moms, bro, and sis-in-law eating well, let's face it, a very schizophrenic thanksgiving dinner.
I told you we didn't go traditional, but we had to have turkey. I really do like turkey a lot, so this had to be included. And heck, let's throw in a ham while we're at it.
In addition to other non-traditional random foods, we had kalbi and some of these shrimps that my mom had marinated with lemon and lime juice, tons of garlic, and some parsley. The only annoying thing was that she left all the shells on. Totally wished she would have peeled em. There was tons of other food too, including some delish spring rolls, but more on them later. It was so much food that when I saw the table, my immediate reaction was "who's gonna eat all this food?" But I guess that's what thanksgiving is all about.

Holiday eats 2007

Hope everyone had a nice holiday season, whatever you celebrated. I celebrated by stuffing my gourd... no different than every day really. I was down in Baltimore earlier on xmas day, and I was being lazy, so I got to my aunt's a bit late for dinner. But luckily for me, there was still some food left, and my aunt, being the loving aunt that she is, guarded some of the chinese dumplings for me. Since after all, I was the one that asked her to get them.



My mom totally surprised me by making these funky fresh spring rolls. They're like the vietnamese ones, but with far more ingredients stuffed in, including: avocado, mixed greens, red and green bell peppers, shrimp, fake crab. They do not include cilantro, mint, or sprouts. But damn, these were good! Instead of the hoisin/peanut based sauce, she made a dipping sauce by using sweet chili sauce (just the simple bottled kind) and squeezing some sriracha in it, to make it even more spicy. I'm going to have to add these to my spring roll repertoire.

Those shrimp look sad and greasy, but they were not. And here are those fine fine dumplings that I love more than just about anything. Even after sitting out awhile, they still tasted great. And I promptly stuffed at least half a dozen in my mouth. There was kalbi, of course, but I did not partake. There was also some shrimp lo mein, with the biggest shrimp I've seen in awhile. After stuffing our gourds, we exercised the food away by playing wii until the wee hours of the evening...

No pressure, but it's your inaugural blog post...

I'm a live to eat girl. I eat what I want, when I want, as much as I want. I don't read nutritional information, I don't follow portion sizes, I don't stop eating just because I feel full. I've lucked out in the gene and metabolism categories, so for now, I'll continue to gorge.

I didn't always start out that way. Apparently, when I was little, I would never eat my mother's cooking. And since that was my main source of food, I didn't eat much. Everyone was worried I would stay scrawny and not ever grow. But take me out to eat or to a meal prepared by anyone other than my mother, and I ate like a sumo wrestler. Go figure.

Since I come from a Korean family, and perhaps it is an Asian thing, I grew up with most things in life revolving around food and eating. When eating breakfast, we would talk about what lunch would be. And same with lunch and what dinner would be. Every gathering was all about food. I suppose I was raised to be way too into food.

I started this blog to just jot down my constant thoughts about food. I may talk about what I ate on a particular day. Or I may review a restaurant. I may try out a new food item/product/gadget and muse upon it. If I cook something and it turns out well, I'll share a recipe. Who knows? Let's just roll with it. I'll try to post pics too, but I can't promise that this blog will be photo-heavy. I'll try my darndest. And don't poo-poo me if I occasionally go off on a non-food related topic. We all fall off the wagon sometimes.

When I had to come up with a name for this blog, I came up with foodzings. Which if I spelled it "correctly" should be foodsings, but then some confused soul may thinkI was referring to singing vegetables. My musings about food. Or better yet, my muzings about food, my foodzings. LET'S GRUB!