Tag Archives: steak

Food adventures

Daegu, Food, , , ,

In the past couple of weeks I have done very little exploring. Work has been quite busy. I’m now teaching a variety lower-level classes as well as the higher-level classes I normally teach, so it takes time. It’s also less fun. The higher level classes require more prep and concentration but are definitely preferable. Because the students’ English is better, it’s possible to explore more interesting topics, rather than being limited by their limited English proficiency. With the lower level classes, I quite often feel as if I’m spending the whole lesson desperately trying to make myself understood.

In spite of the lack of fun exploring, I have had the opportunity to try some new foods and restaurants (mostly thanks to my colleague). The first thing he introduced me to was Naengmyeon. First let me say that Korea can sometimes be a rather strange place and the food is no exception. This dish is basically noodles and vegetables and sometimes a slice of cold meat and/or egg. Fairly standard in a lot of cultures, the difference being in the flavours and spices. This dish is also distinctive because of the ice. Naengmyeon is basically a bowl of ice with noodles and vegetables floating in it, or at least that is how it seems at first. The story goes that it was first eaten because there was no water to make the meal, only snow, so the noodles were eaten in a bowl of fresh snow. My sister’s comment was that having to make do without hot water in a particular situation doesn’t mean you have to keep doing it. In fact, Naengmyeon is pretty good. The noodles are buckwheat noodles, the ice they’re served in is really a light iced broth (possibly vegetable broth) and the julienned vegetables are fresh and raw. It makes for a filling and rather refreshing summer meal. The biggest problem I had was that thin buckwheat noodles and julienned vegetables served in iced broth are particularly difficult to eat with chopsticks when you’re as inept with the chopsticks as I am. The noodles are increadibly long and slippery even when cut up, as ours were. I eventually gave up but I am determined to go back for more (because it was really tasty and refreshing) just as soon as I’m better at the eating implements.

Another delightful culinary adventure was the first time trying Bossam. For many traveling to Asia, the joy of the food lies in the vegetable-heavy rice and noodle dishes and the very spicy foods. I’m a home-grown South African carnivore. I really do like meat and three vegetables. So the vegetarian meals and lots and lots of rice are unlikely to enthrall me, although I’ll definitely try and enjoy it. I’m also still not entirely comfortable with the way in which Korean food is served (purely because it’s foreign to me) –  each person gets an individual portion of rice and/or soup or a small plate and the mains and sides are spread across the table to share. I’m never sure exactly what everything is or how to put it all together. This meal is less intimidating than most. It is also protein-rich and a complete delight to anyone who is a fan of pork. At the restaurant where we were, the meal started with a soup made from some sort of leaf (or perhaps seaweed). I’m not sure at all what leaf (perhaps sesame?), but it was good. That was served with bread, followed by the main spread. We each had a small plate and chopsticks. Side dishes included various pickles, including of course kimchi, some tiny, salted shrimps and dipping sauces. The main meal was a platter of sliced, steamed/boiled pork belly as well as some tofu and steamed duck. Alongside this was served a platter of different leafy greens, including lettuces and sesame leaves. This meal is eaten by wrapping the pork belly in the leaves with kimchi and dipping it into the sauces. It is yummy. I adore bacon and this is a variation on that theme, except with the added freshness of various lettuce leaves and picked cabbage or (which I prefer) radish and sweet/hot/slightly salty flavor from the dipping sauces. Our platter included two varieties of pork, one of which had been beautifully smoked. The duck was also delicious. I was less keen on the tofu but I tried it in the spirit of culinary adventure. I imagine some people would find the pork a little fatty and some pieces definitely were, but there were also bits which had less fat, and even those that were fatty were good with the leaves and pickles to cut through the heaviness. Of course eating this all with chopsticks (except the soup) was the usual struggle, but it was far easier than noodles and worth the effort for the taste.

Today we had been considering an even more exotic experience – there had been comments about live fish. Wednesday late lunches have become a bit of a tradition. In the end we settled for (settled on?) Italian food. My colleague wanted to try out a new restaurant or perhaps visit one he hasn’t been to in a while. When we reached the area, we noticed, across the road, somewhere called Table13. It caught my eye across a paved square complete with fountains and edged with gardens. My colleague mentioned that he knew it before it moved to this location. On a whim, we headed a cross there and were not at all sorry. Table13 lived up to all you’d expect from a restaurant at a large, rather fancy-looking art gallery. The setting is elegant and formal. There are many spectacular restaurants in the world known and appreciated for their quirky and unusual approaches, but nothing beats the good, solid, old-fashioned charm of a civilized restaurant with white table-cloths and coloured overlays, heavy silverware and sparkling glasses. Our table looked out over the paved square with fountains just outside the window. The eating area was backed by rows of cellared wine-bottles. The menu was heavy and elegant. The set menu for lunch included an aperitif, pasta and a salad as well as a main (I had grilled salmon with tagliatelle) followed by coffee. We didn’t have all that much time because my colleague had a class but it was a lovely meal. Later on, (we had several hours between classes) we popped up the road to a coffee shop called Ti-amo and had gelato and cappuccinos. Mmm, chocolate ice-cream.

The absence of other adventures is something I want to rectify but the adventures in food, both Asian and European, is still a fantastic and fascinating part of living in a foreign country.

Mandoo, bibimbap and a good steak

Daegu, Food,

All seems beautiful to me,
can repeat over to men and women You have done such good to me
I would do the same to you,
I will recruit for myself and you as I go,
I will scatter myself among men and women as I go,
I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them,
Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me,
Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me.
Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

A friend sent me this link just at a moment when I was ripe to read these beautiful words and share in the joy of travel. It’s been a long week with many complications and a surfeit of politics and issues but there have definitely been some high points, notably a delightful evening that just ended.
One of the fascinating, and often frustrating, bits of being in another country is the food. Particularly if that country has culinary habits and traditions which are completely alien to your own. To be honest, in Korea, I have eaten mostly Western food, cooked by me in my flat, with the occasional trip to a restaurant with friends, and once Vietnamese noodles. In the past couple of days, I’ve been exposed (thanks to a colleague with excellent taste) to some local food.

The first experience was Wednesday evening when we popped up the road from the school to grab a bite to eat. We work rather odd hours – 3pm to 11pm(ish), so dinner tends to be a rather haphazard affair grabbed in breaks between classes and in free periods, or delayed until the end of work. On this occasion, we had limited time, so we went somewhere close. I wasn’t really hungry, but this colleague is on a mission to expose me to some local food (and feels that I don’t eat enough), so he ordered way too much on the grounds that I would have to try some if it was there. We went to a place that makes Mandoo. The shop/restaurant opens onto the pavement and I walk past it every time I go to the bus stop and have been secretly fascinated by the place billowing steam onto the pavement. Of course, I had no idea what it was and didn’t bother to ask in between the many new things I wanted explanations for. It turns out it sells a Korean food that is described in some of the literature as ‘Korean dumplings’. This may be a little misleading to those who are used to dumplings being bits of dough added to stews. In fact, Mandoo are parcels of meat, vegetables, rice and/or fish wrapped in a thin layer of dough. Sometimes they are served in a beef broth (mandoo-guk), but often they’re fried or steamed (hence the billows of steam). The bit I tasted was a pork, rice and vegetable parcel in dough, steamed. Minced pork is not always particularly attractive as a food but it worked really well in this case. The vegetables were spring onions, I think, and mixed up with the rice and pork, and worked really well. It wasn’t all plain sailing – the dumplings were rather large and complicated to cut up with chopsticks, or to eat whole with chopsticks (which probably indicates a deficiency in my ability with chopsticks rather than a problem with the food). A good snack, though, although I’m told this wasn’t a very good example of Mandoo. In my inexperience, I wasn’t complaining at all.

Wednesday had originally been intended to start with an adventure in local food but work complications got in the way, so the adventure was shifted to Friday, when we had to be at the office early (2pm), so three of us headed off today to a lunch of Korean food. I was running late, partly because I felt the need to shop after I eventually woke up and partly because of misunderstanding of instructions on my part, but I eventually got to the school, where we all hopped into a colleague’s car and headed off to one of the large department stores in Daegu. I was a little unsure of exactly what to expect, but new places, especially with the security of people who you know, are always a good option. The restaurant was on the 11th floor of the building. Part of me is still a small-town Eastern Cape girl not used to very tall buildings. Also, I don’t like elevators, so, having parked in the basement 3 (-3F) level, the elevator ride was not exactly super-fun. When we eventually arrived on the floor we were looking for and found the restaurant, we had to wait about two minutes and then headed for the table. My colleagues ordered, of course – I am nowhere near knowing enough to order – and the food arrived with remarkable speed. Korean food tends to be of the many-side-dishes-around-one-central-bowl type, which I’m still getting used to after English-type meat-and-three-veg meals most of my life. The serving of this meal began with the waitress bringing each of us two bowls of soup, followed by many side dishes and then the central part of the meal, Bibimbap (I think) – literally ‘mixed rice’, a bowl with rice topped with a variety of vegetables and, in this case, tiny strips of seasoned raw beef, which is all mixed together like (my colleague’s analogy not mine) tossed salad. And eaten with a spoon. I, of course, made the faux pas of trying to eat it with chopsticks before someone gently (and only laughing at me a little) corrected me. The dish has a variety of vegetables including (but by no means limited to) spinach (yay!), bean sprouts and beans of some sort. It was quite delicious and definitely not a taste I’m familiar with. Side dishes ranged from fried tiny fish (which tasted extremely fishy), kimchi (vinigery and hot) and fermented soy-bean soup, to pumpkin fritter (or something Koreanly similar – definitely pumpkin). My Korean-American colleague also tried to teach me to use chopsticks, unsuccessfully – the lack of success being a reflection of my ineptitude rather than his instruction.

On the way back to the car, we stopped for a moment on the grocery level. I’m still getting used to department stores but there seem to be levels for every type of bought good imaginable, each section with it’s own check-out point. In the food section, I was momentarily sidetracked by the cheeses. Since getting here I have been singularly disappointed by the cheese, so I was thrilled to see something other than plastic-tasting, processed, gouda-like pale-yellow stuff. They actually had Brie and Camembert. At which point I was further sidetracked by the fact that the Brie and Camembert claimed to be Danish. It appears Koreans are under the impression that all good dairy products come from Denmark. I have no idea where this impression comes from but it was confirmed by a colleague (who also couldn’t explain it). I wonder if the French know that the Koreans think Denmark invented their cheeses? There was also a wine section but, alas, no South African wines.

At this point we headed back to the school and began a long day of work. My day was less tiresome than my colleagues because Fridays are my good day – when I finish at 21:30 instead of after 10pm. This evening, I popped in to say goodbye to a colleagues and was persuaded to stick around with the promise of dinner and a few drinks after work. I sat in on the colleague’s last class. It was informative and somewhat reassuring to see that he runs his classes the same way I do (we teach various classes at the same level), although it’s easy to see how much more experienced he is in this field. After class we waited around while others were working on something else and eventually decided to give up on them and head off.

By this stage I was tired. A night-time life is fine but my body still notices when it’s after 11pm and I was feeling a little like it was time to head home. My colleague (my lift home) was hungry, however, so we headed to one of his favourite restaurants. It turned out to be a delightful corner of Western civilization in the middle of Asia. The restaurant is near to the lake I explored last weekend (was it only last weekend?) and just a few doors down from the almost equally marvellous Africa Café, where we had the most delicious African coffee and honey bread (while talking about work, of course) just the other day. Honey-bread, by the way, is a half-loaf of fresh white bread drizzled with honey, sprinkled with nuts and baked for just long enough to warm it in the oven. Daniel’s Story One is a whole different level of civilised.

I’ve been glad, since I arrived, to discover that there are several places in the city to find steak. I still never expected to find really good steak in Korea. I was wrong. I had steak in a red wine sauce and my colleague had rib-eye steak with mushroom risotto (real risotto so the Italians tell me). In typical Korean fashion, the starters and coffees/desserts (though they’re not great at desserts) come free with the main course. The starter was a cream of broccoli soup (we think), which was good. The steak was fantastic. Perfectly medium-rare, soft as butter and tasty and rich, just the way it should be. With the meal, we ordered a reasonably-priced French Pinot Noir. I was a little dubious about ordering something called ‘Hobnob Pinot Noir (2007)’ but it turned out to be very pleasing and a great accompaniment to the steak. The setting suited the civilised nature of the meal – white table-cloths, with gentle pinky-purple place-mats, and proper silverware and glassware, in a place with many water-features and a few plants and (possibly fake) branches of peach blossoms tastefully arranged. The music was also lovely – the type of gentle, classical, background music that makes such a lovely change from the incessant Korean pop which blares forth in most surroundings. When you sit down at a Korean restaurant – another thing I’m still getting used to – they immediately bring you glasses of water and there are always unexpected and free side-dishes, such as, in this case, a variety of pickles and bread, which form a lovely accompaniment to the meal. To end of the feast of luxury, my friend had a chocolate mousse and iced coffee/milkshake and I had a perfectly civilised coffee. The mousse (yes, I tasted it of course) was oddly watery, while simultaneously being bitter, but the coffee was good. We spent ages over the meal and the desserts, enjoying the peaceful atmosphere and good conversation, before eventually heading home. It wasn’t until we got to the car that I realised it was 2am. I suppose one advantage of becoming nocturnal (a reality of a foreign teacher’s life here) is that late nights no longer seem a bother, but this was definitely also also just one of those evenings when you don’t even notice that time has passed.

As wonderful as it is to try new things and experience new flavours, there is little to compare to the pleasantly familiar luxury of a place like Daniel’s, particularly when there is good steak and red wine and good conversation. I’ll definitely be returning, probably with the same friend. I never thought I’d find a place quite as civilised and Western in my random Asian country but it feels a little good to know that I may just have found my favourite Western restaurant in all of Daegu.

Missing the sky

Daegu, , ,

The warrior’s now a worker and his war is underground
With cordite in the darkness he milks the bleeding veins of gold
When the smoking rock-face murmurs, he always thinks of you
African sky blue
Johnny Clegg and Savuka, African Sky Blue

Daegu is a city of sky-scrapers. Sometimes when I’m moving around in buses and on foot, I can forget this and feel almost as if it is normal for buildings to tower over roads and buildings, but it’s always there at the back of my mind. I find all cities a little claustrophobic. I once spent a day in New York and my lasting impression of it is that there are too many buildings and not enough open spaces. And I don’t mean little parks in between the buildings. I know that lots of cities have created parks and planted trees and done everything they can to ‘green’ their cities. But a little bit of green is not the same as open spaces. This city is surrounded by tree-covered hills (literally surrounded – it feels like there are dozens of them). It’s hard to explain to someone from a completely different world that the green is sometimes as claustrophobic as the huge buildings.

Ultimately, I suppose it comes down to what you’re used to. The area where I’ve been living in South Africa is a forestry area, with miles of green forested hills and some natural forests of the Tsitsikamma variety. But these exist in between the wind-swept grassland mountain slopes and open hills dotted with acacias and the occasional aloe. And all the places I have travelled to in South Africa, as well as the several other places I have lived, have been surrounded by open space. Farmlands and game parks and open veld stretching to the horizon, or the immenseness of the open sea.

One of the other reasons that all South African spaces seem more open is probably because our cities tend to meander off into the distance instead of being compact (modern?) cities. We seem to build out instead of up. I suppose because a shortage of space is not generally a constraint. Plus, of course, ground that is not hugely stable in places like Joburg make building up a little risky. Here they build up. In order to house the apartments and offices of the millions who live in the small-ish city where I am, massive apartment blocks grow towards the heavens. When I first landed in Daegu, I was struck by the fact that, from the air, the sky scrapers looked like clusters of some semi-wild thing growing straight upwards from the ground. From the ground, from the streets and the little parks, they seem like monstrous hunks of concrete towering precariously above you (though the precariousness is probably just a matter of perspective). In a city surrounded by mountains, the sight of a green hill is actually fairly rare; a sweet surprise when you round a bend or find yourself high enough up to see them, but generally hidden by yet another neon-lit sky-scraper. Even from my fifth-floor classroom window, most of the hills are obscured by much taller buildings.

And then there is the rain. A lot of South Africa is way closer to desert than lush green paradise. I love the summer thunderstorms of the Highveld but they don’t deliver all that much rain. Even Cape Town, except when it’s flooding, only gets a moderate amount of rain compared to a lot of other places in the world. I got quite used to regular rain in Cape Town Winters. It didn’t thrill me then, either. This is a lot like that – except that it’s always hot. And there seems to be even more of it. I don’t think there has been a dry day since I arrived. I now don’t ever leave the house without an umbrella and most days I wake up to and/or go to sleep to the sound of rain. Today I was glad that the rain woke me because I had forgotten to set my alarm. But at some point enough feels like enough. You start to wonder how there can possibly be so much water in the sky (yes, I know scientifically that is a silly statement, but that’s how it feels). Particularly in the mornings when I’m walking to the bus stop  in the rain (almost without fail). And everything is always a tiny bit damp. Sometimes, when the rain is light, it doesn’t even seem worth the effort of opening an umbrella – and you know that it’s hot enough that the few drops of rain will dry off quickly. Even if I do get odd looks. But often it pours for hours at a time. This also means that there are always clouds. This isn’t the kind of rain that builds, then pours, then clears. Even on the rare occasions when I catch a glimpse of the sky (behind the dark green mountains and the dark grey sky-scrapers), it is grey and full of clouds and rain.

A friend has posted some stunning pics of a trip he took to Lesotho, complete with wonderful wide open sky. Looking at them this afternoon, I was filled with the first surges of homesickness – a deep longing for wide open spaces and endless blue skies. There is something amazing about the emptiness of the African sky – resting a million miles above an African Winter landscape, pale and dry and stretching forever to the horizon. Dana Synman writes in his book, On the Back Roads, “…Maybe it’s because today most of us are confined to life in the cooped-up spaces of the cities. It’s great to know there’s open space out there where you can just drive, and drive, and drive. Open spaces allow you to dream dreams of freedom.” A colleague and I were talking today about how the Koreans seem to live very ordered, confined lives. It’s an almost perfect foil to the freedom of open spaces. The symbol of that freedom for me will always be the sky – those wide open skies that go on forever and forever, with a depth and an intensity that seems to last until the end of time. It makes me think of the Voortrekkers, taking off across the mountains, into the distance – heading out to forever and a future that was uncertain but free. I wonder if they sensed the amazing weight of that empty sky.

Before this bout of longing for African skies, I had lunch today (with same colleague) at a place called Outback. Apparently there is some sense of the value of wide open spaces here, too, even if the name is (as I imagine it is) intended to appeal mostly to the minds (and wallets) of foreigners. Whatever their gimmick, I was not going to complain about being in a restaurant where I could order a steak – a good, solid, rich, medium-rare steak. Meat makes me happy, so it’s good to know that there are places to get a good steak in town. It may not happen often, but it’s good to know there is the option.

We also drove past a group of about 20 people sitting on the pavement outside a building, each on a square of plastic with some kind of plastic topped thing that looked a little like a plastic fan. I was a little confused. Then we saw them all start tapping their plastic things on the ground in unison and chanting. Apparently they were having some kind of protest. I always have a sense of something wrong when I see people from other countries protesting. I had the same feeling watching protests in the UK on TV earlier this year. I feel like they’re not doing it right. I tried to explain it to my colleague, how I feel that they’re not taking it seriously – they’re just not doing it right. In South Africa, a protest involves people who feel very strongly about their issue and will make that very clear with loud, un-ignorable singing and dancing. My colleague pointed out that if he was in charge he probably wouldn’t take it too seriously if people were singing and dancing in protest. Perhaps I didn’t explain it right. I remember watching a BBC report on protests somewhere (Indonesia?) earlier this year and thinking that the reporter was missing the point when he said that all seemed calm because people were singing and dancing. Perhaps it is because I know only too well (based on my country’s history) that a singing, dancing crowd is fully capable of turning to violence if their voices are not heard, but watching a crowd toyi-toyi, it feels like they’re taking it seriously. Or maybe it is the unique strangeness of South Africa (Southern Africa?) that singing and dancing are not just frivolous recreational pastimes, they’re part of everything – a serious, meaningful part of every serious, meaningful thing.

A serious part of every aspect of my life, too, no matter how far away I am. Like the African performances at the Mandela Day concert in New York, which I loved. Particularly Chris Chameleon and Baaba Maal. And watching Jesse Clegg and Freshly Ground perform Asimbonanga, which felt a little bit (at least from my slightly nostalgic perspective) like a new generation of South African musicians taking the torch. The music I can take with me – even if most people here will never quite understand it. Some days I wish I could do the same with the African sky.