How to make beef broth for duk mandoo guk by the Seoulsisters

Day One

Before 

After

(More pics to follow...)

Mandoos after Midnight

My sister and I have been talking about making mandoo (the Korean word for dumplings) to bring in the new year, so I decided to start experimenting with whatever ingredients I could find in our fridge tonight. The fact that this happened after midnight reflects how inspiration strikes at odd times. 

The fried version consists of ground pork, enoki mushrooms, scallions, cilantro, ginger, garlic, red onion, mirin, soy, & sesame oil.  

The one above was filled with all of the ingredients in the fried version plus minced chicken and black bean chili paste and simmered in a gingered chicken broth. 

Fancy That: Hakusan Porcelain Cups

 Fancy Cups by Masahiro Mori

I bought mine at: 

http://www.fitzsu.com/hakusan_c9834/

Seoulstice # 1: Spicy Lotus Root

Seoulstice: # 1 

Spicy Lotus Root

I prepared lotus root tonight as an homage to the delicious version I loved to eat at a restaurant called Ita-Cho (in the mini-mall) in Los Angeles during the mid-nineties. I generally cook by sight, taste, and instinct, so writing precise recipes for seoulstice the cookbook will probably take a lot of practice.

Please bear with me while I get my bearings.

Lotus Root, four bulbs

(peeled, thinly sliced, then submerged in lightly vinegared water to prevent discoloration until ready for use)

Canola Oil, 1-2 tbsp

Sake, 2 tbsp

Mirin, 2 tbsp

Soy Sauce, 2 tbsp

Togarashi, 1 tsp

Happy Holidays

Happy holidays, 2009

Mark Steinmetz, Stone Mountain

READ: Children of the Albatross by Anais Nin

"There were rooms and costumes which appeared to be made to lure but which were actually effective means to create distance."

"The only words which opened her being were the muffled words of poets so rarely uttered by human beings. They alone penetrated her without awakening the bristling guards on watch at the gateways, costumed like silver porcupines armed with mistrust, barring the way to the secret recesses of her thoughts and feelings."

"fluent waist"
"rhetorical feet"
"eloquent with her body."

"tender inflections of the voice without malice or mockery"

"She never knew whether two people woven together by feelings answering each other as echoes threw off a phosphorescence, the chemical sparks of marriage, or whether each one threw upon the other the spotlight of his inner dream."

"Strange scenes took place between them. She subdued her intelligence and became passive to please him.  But it was a game and they both knew it. Her ebullience broke through all her pretenses at quietism."

"No sadness could resist this frenzied carnival of affection he dispensed every day, beginning with his enthusiasm for his first cup of coffee, joy at the day's beginning, an immediate fancy for the first person he saw, a passion at the least provocation for man, woman, child, or animal. A warmth even in his collisions with misfortunes, troubles and difficulties.

He received them smiling. Without money in his pocket he rushed to help. With generous excess he rushed to love, to desire, to possess, to lose, to suffer, to die the multiple little deaths everyone dies each day. He would even die and weep and suffer and lose with enthusiasm, with ardor. He was prodigal in poverty, rich and abundant in some invisible chemical equivalent to gold and sun."

"His joy was in movement, in assenting, in consenting, in expansion."

"we should be kind/ While there is still time."

The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   

A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   

Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   

Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   

Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.

The first day after a death, the new absence   

Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind   

While there is still time. 

Philip Larkin

Happy Holidays!

For You

For you I undress down to the sheaths of my nerves.

I remove my jewelry and set it on the nightstand,
I unhook my ribs, spread my lungs flat on a chair.
I dissolve like a remedy in water, in wine.
I spill without staining, and leave without stirring the air.
I do it for love. For love, I disappear.

Kim Addonizio

The Fraudulence Paradox

“The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside — you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn’t find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were. Logically, you would think that the moment a supposedly intelligent nineteen-year-old became aware of this paradox, he’d stop being a fraud and just settle for being himself (whatever that was) because he’d figured out that being a fraud was a vicious infinite regress that ultimately resulted in being frightened, lonely, alienated, etc. But here was the other, higher-order paradox, which didn’t even have a form or name — I didn’t, I couldn’t.”

― David Foster Wallace