Gross stuff

Food in  Korea is interesting.  Just like American food, some is awesome and some is disgusting.  I'll start with the gross stuff first.  Next week, we will have the delicious foods.

Our parents brought us up right.  Eat all the food on your plate--no questions asked.  Also, when someone gives us food, we feel obligated to eat all of it.  If it's gross, may be we'll come to like it in the end.  Other times, we wonder if we have some sort of psycological problem becasues we find our selves eating stuff that is totally gross--that we knew was gross to start with--and will continue to be gross after we are finished.  After all, insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly expecting a different result eventually.  Here are some gross foods we've encountered, and the sometimes awkward social situations that always accompany gross food.

Fermented crab

 Our landlady is a wonderful person.  She is always very kind and gracious, and she always has extra food to get rid of.  We have gotten many yummy things from her when we pay rent.  Once she even fed us dinner! But normally it is just some yummy fruit such as persimmons, apples or jujubes (yes they are a type of fruit, they taste kind of like tiny apples).

But one day we got some fermented crab (A Korean delicacy).  They said to eat it with rice, so we did, but it had a strong smell of ammonia and it was hard to eat and hard to breathe because of the smell.  It was squishy, and hard to crack open.   When we got done, we smelled like ammonia for the next several hours.  Incidentally, when we asked our Korean friends about this food, they said that they loved it.  Some times I really wonder about this country.

DARE Just say no.  Even though it is on a fancy plate and all the Koreans are eating it, stay away!

Raw sea squirt

Once we went out to eat with our lab group for a bonding experience.  We had lots of fun, and played kick volleyball (it's hard but its popular here.)  You lower the net so that the ball can actually make it over.  Anyway, since we were at the beach, we had to eat seafood.  So far, our seafood experiences hadn't been very positive, but this time we had roasted shellfish which wasn't that bad.  Of course, it being a special trip, we also had to have delicacies.  This means raw seafood.  We had raw fish and raw shrimp, but the weirdest one was the raw sea squirt.  It tasted like snot.

Squishy persimmon (감)

 Persimmons here are much bigger than in the US.  They taste like an pear, but with the texture and structure of a tomato.  They are very yummy.  One month our landlord gave us some to take with us, and we were happy.

The next month after paying rent, we got some older looking, squishy persimons.  Not wanting to be rude, we took them and thanked our kind landlord who is always good to us.  We wondered if we should eat them, and we decided we should because our ancestors didn't have refrigerators, and this is how they ate, and they probably survived on squishy fruit.  After all, jelly and jam are really just squishy fruit.  So we ate the squishy fruit, and despite being grossed out, it was good and sweet, and it was good to spread on toast--like jam.

But the next month after we paid rent, we got even older looking persimmons.  This time, they were even more shriveled, and they had white stuff on them!  Now we were thinking of how our ancestors had short lives--probably due to all that squishy fruit.  We decided that it was probably unhealthy to eat, and regretfully threw the squish fruit in the compost can.  Incidentally, a few months later, we saw some shriveled up fruit with white stuff on it in high-end packaging at the Seoul Train Station. 

Top: The yummy fresh persimmon
Bottom: The scary dried persimmon.  It may be
good for all we know, but we are too afraid to try

Boiled Seafood

On a trip with our chruch, we went to this island (SapShiDo), and while we were there, all of the a-joo-ma-s (Korean word for aunt) cooked us yummy food, and gave us the best stuff becasue we were foreigners who had never eaten it before.  It was all delicious, and we definately gained some weight.  But, on the way back everyone went to a seafood restaurant.  We did not know what we were getting, and we trusted that the food would be equally as delicious as what the a-joo-ma-s had cooked for us.  But...  we got boiled seafood.  It consists of all the yummy sea creatures that we normally eat along with some squid etc.  But what anyone who cooks seafood should know is that you should NEVER NEVER NEVER boil entire sea creatures.  The problem with boiled seafood is that all the gross stuff that is included in a sea creature gets dissolved and goes everywhere, and your tongue know this, and it is not pleasant to eat at all.  I (Riley) normally get a little sea sick on buses, and on the bus back, I was sea sick--but luckily nothing bad happened.

A Korean's Pictures of Yummy--Not boiled--Seafood

번데기 (bohn-dae-gee)

 One day we went to a spring festival to hang out with our friends and eat the street vendor food--which was delicious.  But we saw something that looked out of place--insects, so I got half a cup of them to try.  The first few tasted alright, but after about five of them Margaret decided to stop helping me eat them, and after about 10 of them, I started getting a stomach ache.  I finished the cup, and decided never to eat this type of insect again.

 Stay tuned!  

       Next week, we will tell you about our favorite foods!