Archive for the 'Food and Drink' Category

May

Teacher’s Day — 2009

Today is Teacher’s Day in Korea. I’m touched by the generosity of my students and their parents. It was such a treat to have kids come up, give me gifts and hugs, and tell me how much they appreciate what I do. There are good days and bad days in teaching, as in every profession. Today was definitely a good day, and not just because of the gifts. And those good days really do make up for the bad days.

Emma from Picasso got me a bottle of perfume
Mel from Nobel gave me a homemade muffin
Lucy from Einstein gave me some lip gloss
Lina from Dewey gave the teachers cookies
Denny from Newton gave me an award ribbon
Fred from Newton gave me ginsing slices
Lola from Einstein gave me a note and some rice cakes
Rocky from Picasso gave the teachers pizza and soda
Penny from Newton gave me a hair clip
Warren from A3 gave me a pen
James from A1 gave me some jam
Eric from A1 gave me a scarf
Ellie from A1 gave me sunblock
Nick from D1 gave me flowers
Rose from D4 gave me soap
Alex from B2 gave me soap
Sally from D3 gave me lotion
Julie from D4 gave me socks and a note written on a balloon
Flora from D3 gave me chocolate

I’m so blessed to have wonderful students. They all have their quirks and problem days. But for the most part, they are good kids.

posted by Kathryn in Celebrations,Food and Drink,Holidays,Korea,Little Campus,Students,Teaching and have No Comments

May

9 Course Chinese Meal…

… but only 8 pictures. In my excitement, I forgot to take a picture of one of the courses.

Backstory: There’s a little Chinese restaurant right up the street from where I live and work. It’s owned by a very nice Chinese couple. Prices are very reasonable and the food is pretty good. You can get an 8 course meal for 15,000 Won per person. I’ve never seen so much food in my life. We actually got a 9th course. The four of us greatly enjoyed ourselves.

Pictures of the food. I don’t even remember what was in the dishes. I was too busy eating, and eating and eating.

posted by Kathryn in Food and Drink,Fun things,Home Life,Off time,Pictures and have No Comments

Nov

Happy Pepero Day!

Peperos Happy Pepero Day to all!

Pepero Day is celebrated here in South Korea by giving people “Peperos”. They are long skinny cookies sticks dipped in chocolate. Very yummy! If you’re a teacher, you usually end up with tons of them. Personally, I only eat Peperos on Pepero Day. By the time the tenth student offers them to you, you get pretty sick of them. Today, I actually got a hand dipped one. Not the bulk things that Lotte makes. It was dipped in white chocolate and had sprinkles on it.

I have a pile of these things sitting on my desk. I’ll probably throw some in the box I send home with Christmas gifts. The rest I’ll give out as treats to the kids, in moderation of course. The vast majority of my kids today were way high on sugar. Ha, and I taught a unit to C1 on healthy eating as they were munching chocolate covered cookies.

The legend is that Pepero Day started in Busan. A bunch of girls started exchanging the snack and wishing each other that they would become as tall and thin as a Pepero. Nice legend. But more likely it was started by the folks at Lotte who make Peperos. It’s a true Korean “Hallmark” holiday.

Pepero Day is always celebrated on November 11th. Why that day? When you write the date at 11/11, it looks like four Peperos standing side by side.

See Wikipedia (who else?) for more information and links.

posted by Kathryn in Food and Drink,Fun things,Holidays,Korea,Students and have Comment (1)

Feb

Cabbage in Space

Remember that old Muppet’s skit, “Pigs in Space“? Well, apparently there will soon be kimchi in space. A South Korean astronaut will be staying aboard the International Space Station sometime in the coming months. To help combat homesickness, guest astronauts are allowed to bring foods from their home country. So…

Three top government research institutes spent millions of dollars and several years perfecting a version of kimchi that would not turn dangerous when exposed to cosmic rays or other forms of radiation and would not put off non-Korean astronauts with its pungency.

Read the full articles at the New York Times.

posted by Kathryn in Food and Drink,Fun things,Just Wow,Korea,Off time,Web sites and have No Comments

Nov

Pictures!

I had written a few weeks ago that I was having issues with the service I chose to host my photos. I never managed to find a way to get in touch with the folks and the forums were less than helpful. I can’t complain too much because I had a free account. So I found a new service. I don’t even remember what I was reading, but I came across webshots.com. The free account isn’t a bad deal. You get 1000 photos initially and then an additional 100 photos per month of storage space.

Uploading isn’t too bad on Windows. Supposedly there’s a desktop program you can download. Doesn’t do me much good with my main box being booted into Linux 99.9% of the time. The web uploader crashed Firefox in Linux reliably, but it worked fine on Windows XP.

To get my photos uploaded without going back to Windows on my main box, I learned how to mount my XP’s computer’s hard drive as a network share. I backed up all of my photos to my XP box (a good idea any way) and used the web uploader from there.

To make a long story short, all my photos are now posted. Yes, all 706 of them. They can be found here.

posted by Kathryn in Activites,Food and Drink,Fun things,Games,Home Life,Korea,Pictures,Staff,Students,Teaching,Web sites and have No Comments

Nov

Pepero Day

Peperos Happy Pepero Day to all!

Pepero Day is always celebrated on November 11th. Why that day? When you write the date at 11/11, it looks like four Peperos standing side by side.

posted by Kathryn in Food and Drink,Fun things,Korea and have No Comments

Jun

Kim Chi Chun

I know how to cook exactly one Korean dish. And as I had it for dinner tonight, I decided to take some pictures along the way and teach the rest of you how to make Kim Chi Chun.

Kim Chi Chun is like a savory pancake. It’s extremely easy to make. Heck, even I can do it. Sorry about the fuzzy measurements below. I do this by eye as I have no measuring cups or spoons. And it’s not like baking where all the amounts need to be precise. As long as your batter is about the same consistency as pancake batter, you’ll be fine.

Start by assembling your ingredients. You’ll need flour (just plain old white flour will do), water, Kim chi, oil and salt (optional).

Then get all of your tools together. You’ll need a frying pan, a spatula, a cutting board, scissors, a spoon and a bowl.

Dump some flour into the bowl (I think I used about a cup) and pour some water over it (a 1/3 of a cup maybe) and mix. The consistency should be the same as pancake batter.

Open the bag of kim chi and pour the liquid into the bowl. Then take your scissors and shred the kim chi.

Dump the Kim chi into the batter and mix well.

Now put a couple of tablespoons of oil in your skillet and heat it up. Once it’s hot, pour some of the batter into the skillet. They should be the size of small pancakes.

When they have cooked a minute or so, flip them. This is the same as if you were making breakfast pancakes.

Cook until no more batter oozes out when you press on them with a spatula. Put them on a plate and sprinkle with a tiny bit of salt. This, of course, is optional if you’re watching your sodium intake.