Korean Feast the Easy Way

I had a meeting at our house and in order to entice people to attend the meeting, I baited them with yummy food. I was going to make Hawaiian food but I'm often doing that so I figured I'd take a different tact. I decided to make a Korean lunch with lots and lots of garlic!!

On the menu: Beef kimchee stew, tofu-okara cakes with kochujang sauce, homemade cucumber kimchee, sutchul namul(various vegetable side dishes, rice, and sherbert for dessert. Did my practice tofu-okara cakes and found out that you need to use extra firm tofu and squeeze out the water.

Since I had classes on Wednesday, I really had to go into high gear to purchase the ingredients after class. Then I had a touch of ach-phenomenon. Why should I make the side dishes when I could go to the Korean restaurant? I priced a small container at $4.63. When I went to pick up the veggies...the countergirl suggested I purchase the veggie plate and I could get five sides for about $6...Eureka!!! There was my answer!! I ended up getting double orders of bean sprouts, and kombu (seaweed), and mustard cabbage. Uiha!! what a time saver!!

Come 11:00 on Thursday, all the food was done. My kimchee stew was made with homegrown beef, sour kimchee, bamboo shoots, turnips, carrots, potatoes, green onions, kimchee base, red pepper flakes, red pepper powder, and kochujung. The meat was a tender as butter and with hot rice...a winner!! I left the food inside the house as we had our meeting in the garage. I didn't want the smells of garlic to interrupt our thoughts.

At noon, I busted out the food. There was silence so I think the food was good.

For dinner, we copied what we've seen on Korean dramas...put a bunch of rice in a large bowl, throw in the left over side dishes, slice up some leftover chicken from the night before and add a heaping tablespoon of kochujang and stir the mixture.
Impromptu bibinpap!! What a way to end the day...we turned on to KBFD and we were in Korean Heaven.

Forgotten Things

I don't know about you but when I am stressed, I seem to add more stress by misplacing things. An envelope with $500 cash, my glasses, my keys, my wallet, an important letter...the list goes on and on. Then I go crazy looking around for it.

The latest adventure was the loss of a Walmart bag with a bottle of Bioastin, a lauhala journal, and a roll of glue. I searched all over the house, even checking the garbage bag if in case I threw the bag away. I secretly thought that my husband put the bag away in such places as the high kitchen cabinet above the refrigerator or some weird location like that. I stomped around, shaking the walls of my house with my thunder footsteps...grumbling under my breath, certain that my husband put the package away some place and feigned ignorance about its whereabouts.

Saturday night, sick with the flu, I decided to make my "clean the refrigerator" vegetable soup made with a conglomeration of little bits of leftovers. And lo and behold...there was the sucking Walmart bag in the refrigerator. Could it be possible that the culprit of stupidity was me? What a super knucklehead after all the energy I spent blaming my husband. This is indeed the time to re-air my poem on Forgotten Things.

Forgotten Things
Muriel Mililani Hughes

Me no mai mono, mie nai koto.
Things in front of your eyes are the subjects of blindness.
I just made up this ancient Japanese saying
But ain't it the truth?
Don't it just piss you off when you can't find
Some monumental crap you've been looking for?
These trivial things are so damn important at the time.
When you finally get your hands on them,
You see what a sorry excuse for treasure they are.

Okay, some people say we lose things because
Of stress or some Freudian reason
Linked to parts of the body that have nothing to do
With where we last left the crap.
Others say that we lose things because
We are so damned sloppy.
So...I love sloppy. Don't be accusing me of being
An anal retentive neatnick. Ah....See? Freud gets in his digs again.

I think we lose things because they have their own karma
And travel to Forgotten Things Nirvana
Where they exist to laugh at us as we chase our tails,
Looking under beds and piles of paper,
Sweating and elevating our own blood pressure.
Some cosmic creator of Forgotten Things has a monumental
Plan to see us squirm, suffer, and promise to repent if only
We could find the damn crap!

Beside the ancient Japanese saying that I just made up
I have come to an earth-shattering realization.


Sometimes, we are just idiots, plain and simple
And deserve to suffer.