Rice and Shit

Billions of people across the world agree, rice is good shit. A short post on rice and why it's great.

What makes rice great?

1. If you're lazy as balls like my dad and just want carbs, just eat rice with sauce. Once we had a "guys night" when my mom went to Maryland and we watched Korean War movies and ate rice with sauce on it and maybe downloaded a trial version of Starcraft.

2. It keeps in all temperatures. This is useful when you live on a mountain or some shit like Tibetans(?)

3. If you're in the mood for a thousand of something, rice hits the spot. Sometimes I'm in the mood for a thousand ice creams, but there are lots of metaphysical and logistical problems with such untamed desire.

Rice also comes in many forms, like a final video game boss or racism. It's an incredibly versatile food:

1. Rice Balls

Rice balls are great because they're portable, quick, and can hide unpleasant surprises for your enemies. My mom tells a great story about the time my dad forgot to pick her up from work so she put bananas and mayo in a rice ball she packed for him.

me: so what happened?

mom: he threw up! HAHAHAHA

Always check yourself and your rice balls before you bite into them. Apparently during the Edo Period, a powerful shogun was assassinated via poisonous riceball prepared by a beautiful geisha-ninja. I also apparently just made this up lol.

2. Congee

There's a great place in Flushing, NY where you sit down and the Chinese waitresses very angrily ask you what you want and then less than five minutes later, a steaming bowl of savory and meaty congee is presented to you. Why are they so angry?!

3. Rice cake

Rice cake is the best fucking kind of cake, even though I pretend to love all cakes equally. To make them, you grind up rice, add hot water, mix, and BAM! None of that cream the butter preheat the oven 350 degrees bullshit. Making rice cakes with my mom was always fun, because those sessions were often much less confrontational because it's actually kind of a stressful process.

We like to press edible flowers into our rice cakes, so that when they cook, they get somewhat engulfed by the glutenous mass but are still visible through the translucent dough. Sometimes we don't use edible flowers and use petals from the flowers of hospital rooms of dead people (my mom is a nurse). I don't eat these. My mom's argument is that dead people can't enjoy flowers, which is true, but like other things she says, misses the point.

4. Noodles

Rice can be turned into noodles. I have yet to see this magical process at work, but I expect it involves a great deal of shamanistic ritual and animist woop-de-wooping.

I love making rice balls with my mom. Mostly because then I can actually see what goes in them. Sometimes what my mom likes to call "surprises" are actually absolutely horrifying and extremely strange.

me: Mom, WHAT THE HELL IS IN THIS?

mom: JOLLY RANCHER SURPRISE!!!!!

Anyways, here is a quick recipe for rice balls and some really great fillings and toppings you can put on them.

Ingredients:

Cooked steamed rice

Rice Vinegar

Dried Seaweed (nori)

utensils:

bowl

rice cooker

fan

wooden spoon/rice paddle

So take out the hot steamed rice from the rice cooker. To get the best rice for this, use a little less water than you normally would so the rice comes out a little drier. Then quickly pour the rice vinegar over the rice and mix with the paddle very quickly in chopping motions, stirring constantly.

It helps to have a helper with a fan nearby, fanning the rice as you mix and turn it. This will help the rice cool much faster and help you get even coverage over the rice.

Set aside a bowl of water and put in some salt. Or, if you have sesame oil, put that aside. Cover your hands with some of this water or oil and then get ready for shit to go down.

When the rice is sufficiently cooled, take a handful of it and form it into any shape you want. The traditional shape is a triangle, but balls and cylinders also work. Set them aside. If at this point, you want to put in the filling, it is a good time to do so.

Cut out strips of seaweed with scissors or a knife and wrap them around the rice balls as you see fit. Then you can cover them with sesame seeds, or seaweed flakes, or whatever you want. I sometimes like to roll them in hot chili powder!

Take time to experiment! Remember, it's not rocket science-it's a fucking ball of rice.

Turkey and Shit

Thanksgiving is fast approaching and along with it comes a few extra pounds and so much fucking gravy. Nothing upsets me more than the sounds of sloshing (which lots of Thanksgiving food does) but there is really a quiet elegance to consuming that much food in such a short amount of time.

Thanksgiving at my house is very different than your standard white-bread TV Thanksgiving because we came to a consensus as a family that Thanksgiving food is "fucking gay" (my words) and "Unimaginative and antiquated" (my little sister's words). So we do Thanksgiving OUR WAY.

You could probably shit up some rhetoric about how we have "made Thanksgiving reflective of our immigrant experience, blending our unique cultural heritage with a time-honored American tradition," but honestly I think it's all about finding an excuse to bust out our deep-fryer.

Here's a breakdown of the staple dishes we eat at Thanksgiving. Hopefully I'll have pictures up next weekend of the gastronomic massacre.

1. not turkey

When I was a kid (6 years old), the Rim family hadn't celebrated Thanksgiving yet. When it came up in school, I just thought it was some Catholic thing like Easter because my early education was administered by a legion of stern Asian nuns. However, once I found out that American society had dedicated an ENTIRE FUCKING DAY to overeating, I wanted in bad.

I wanted turkey. Did you ever do that lame ass thing where you drew around your hand and turned it into a turkey? I did. Many times. I wanted it. I wanted to eat it. It's a common theme in my life. If I want it, I probably also want it in my mouth. ZING! lol

Anyway, I asked my mom to make a turkey. She made everything else, so why hadn't she ever made turkey? How come we never did things like other American families?

"Chicken is better," she said. And my dad nodded in agreement.

She said this with the cold, judgmental face reserved for the underperforming children of her peers and women who showed too much boob. But I later found out that they had eaten Turkey many times at her friend Ganel's house, a large and extremely friendly Black woman who worked with my mom and later taught me the basics of tax evasion. They absolutely hated the turkey. But they liked the "The Black stuff," which I thought was terribly racist until I found out they were referring to black-eyed peas.

So, on Thanksgiving day, I was greeted by a large plate of fried chicken. I cried. I know, I know "shut up you stupid brat." I grudgingly ate the chicken, which was delicious, but tasted like defeat. I realized later in life, many turkeys later in various contexts, that my mother was right all along. Turkey is fucking gross. NEEDS MORE HAM!

And then we started going to my uncle's house for Thanksgiving, where he'd scare us by saying that he shot the turkey himself. It turned out to be true. Koreans don't fuck around about the harsh realities of life. That turkey isn't that bad. I guess when there's still a bit of fear left in the animal, it tastes that much better.

2. Kalbi - Korean-style short ribs! A post is coming up soon about this delicious, delicious stuff.

3. Fried Sweet Potatoes - Check this out: you take sweet potatoes, cook them in a frying pan with loads of brown sugar and them BAM you had things that look like turds but taste like Jesus.

4. Sushi Rolls! Except not with fish-with vegetables. And if you argue that sushi needs to have fish to actually be sushi, then suck my dick. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sushi <---Here, educate yourself.

Other stuff too. Here's what the menu this year looks like: Fried Chicken, Fried Sweet Potato, Sushi Rolls, Kalbi, Potato Croquettes, Kimchi, Lots of fried rice and regular rice, sweet potato cake, sweet iced rice drink, glass noodles with veggies, pickled radish, half-moon rice cakes, stuffing, and NO GRAVY. JIZZ.

So here's a recipe for NOT TURKEY:

Ingredients:
Not a turkey
Fried Chicken

Directions
1. Do not make a turkey
2. Make fried chicken

Dumplings and Shit

There is just something so elegant about random shit packed into a ball of carbs. It exists in absolutely every advanced culture:

Italian: Ravioli, stuffed-crust pizza

Mexican: Empanada, taco

Indian: Samosas

Russian: Pirozhki

French: not an advanced culture

Asian: Dumplings

American: EVERYTHING

It's really so simple! Take something, cook it, and then put it in something made of some sort of carb. Name one thing that wouldn't taste good wrapped in dough and fried and I'll tell you you're wrong and we'll try and make it together! But don't try and be cute and say "poop" or "AIDS" 'cause I'll fucking cut you.

Dumplings, the Asian version of the pig in a blanket, are up there along with diet coke and fried chicken as undisputed favorite things for me to eat. New York has TONS of Asians, so I was popping this shit all the time. But, nothing will taste better to me than my mom's dumplings.

Imagine biting into something crispy yet very tender. It starts off with that wonderful taste of seared dough and then immediately the juices from the meat filling explode onto your tongue. The ginger and the garlic flavors and smells immediately hit you and soon you feel the textures of the meat and the chopped cabbage and glass noodles. In a few more bites, that shit is GONE. Pair that with a bowl of steaming ramen and you're set for a New York January during winter break.

But beyond eating them, making dumplings is a process and a joy in itself. You make the filling and you have the little pre-packaged dough wrappers and suddenly you're fucking Michelangelo. When I would make them with my mom, sometimes I would try and get creative and deviate from the standard crescent moon design. My mom always encouraged my creativity, and would point to the misshapen ones to our guests after they were cooked and proudly tell them that I helped make them. But BILLIONS OF ASIANS AGREE: the crescent moon shape works!

I'll never forget the last time I made dumplings with my mom (We call them "mandu" in Korean). She always complimented me the way I folded the tops of them, like pleats in a dress. I think because we both have above-average spacial reasoning skills (it's true. Watch me pack sweaters into a box one day if you have nothing else to do), I was always able to place the right amount of mixture into the dough so that it didn't spill out but just enough that you got some nice juicy pork when you bit into it.

We always use the time sitting on the cold kitchen floor to talk about things. Ever since I went to college, conversations with my mom have gotten longer and longer because even silences are meaningful when you see people every day. She always asks what I'm learning, and I'll tell her some convoluted academic bull shit and she'll just say "mmhmm" and tell me to "learn more and do things better."

Anyway, these conversations are always great, except sometimes they can get confrontational.

An example:

Me: I love making mandu with you. Do you remember when I used to-

Mom: HAS JESUS LEFT YOUR LIFE?!?!?!

That scared the shit out of me because it came out of fucking nowhere. I swear, we were probably talking about proper eye care because it was around the time I got my new glasses. Beyond being time to catch up with me, it's time for my mom to tell me to do a variety of things that fall into three broad categories:

1. Make babies immediately with a wide-hipped Korean woman

2. Pray to Jesus to help me get a perfect score on the MCAT

3. Try alternative medicine because sticking needles in my thigh will fix my weight problem

Anyways, eventually we'll be done and I'll weave my way carefully around these questions ("All the wide-hipped Korean girls I know are Catholic," "Mom, if Jesus gave EVERY Korean kid a perfect score on the MCAT, then how would the white kids feel?" and "The last acupuncturist I saw molested me.") We'll put our several dozen dumplings in the steamer and watch a Korean soap together and then we'll eat the ugly ones and then feed them to my dad, who FLIPS A SHIT whenever we make dumplings.

So here's roughly how I remember how to make dumplings, the Jung Ok Rim way:

Ingredients:

Veggies

A cabbage

A few carrots

Onion

Chives (what the fuck are chives? I think that's what they're called. They're scallion-like. Maybe they're actually scallions)

Other veggies I've seen my mom use are carrots and mashed potato!

Real ingredients

A meat of your choice

Other shit

glass noodles

sugar

salt

soy sauce

sesame oil

honey

ground garlic and ginger

Instructions:

Chop up the veggies all fine and niceee. Toss them all together and set aside. I shouldn't have to explain this part all that hard.

TAKE THE GROUND MEAT and then add in a bit of salt, sugar, soy sauce, sesame oil, honey, and ground ginger and garlic. It should smell wonderful! If it doesn't, then you're doing something really wrong. Anyway, mix this up very well (use your hands! Like my mom says, using utensils is for pussies) and then combine this with the vegetables. If you want, then cook up some glass noodles in hot water, chop them up, and combine too!

THEN, this is the fun part. Make sure you have a clean workspace and sprinkle some flour or potato starch on a tray that you will use to place your dumplings after you've made them. Take a package of dumpling wrappers and open it. You can make these on your own, but why do that when it's cheaper to buy the packets yourself?

Take a small spoonful of your mixture and put it in the middle of the wrapper. Take some water dip your finger in it and wet the circumference of the wrapper. Then, press the sides together as if you were folding it in half, and WHA-BLAMO! You just made a dumpling!

Now, if you want to get all fancy and shit like me and my mom then you can pleat the tops. They are purely cosmetic but maybe they seal the filling better. Once you have a lot of these, get your steamer ready! If you don't have a steamer on hand, it's easy! Just get a frying pan, put on some sesame oil and then fry them for about 2-3 minutes. Then, pour a little bit of water into your pan and then cover. You'll get wonderfully steamed dumplings on one side and they'll also be fried on the other. Best of both worlds!

Enjoy with your favorite dipping sauce. Here's a favorite of mine. It's something I made up!

Soy sauce

Sesame oil (a little bit)

Siracha sauce

Sesame seeds

Honey

(Honestly, like i've said before, anything tastes good wrapped in dough and fried, so try whatever you want)

There you have it! My culture's incarnation of the pig in a blanket! These are perfect when you have a bunch of people who are coming over and only have half the day to prepare something for them that will disappear in a matter of minutes.

PS My acupuncturist did not actually molest me

Chicks, not Chickens

I fucking love chicken fingers. Here's a good example of how they affect my life. One beautiful Friday morning in front of the dining hall where they serve chicken fingers every Friday, I encountered an enthusiastic girl I sang with in chorus.

Girl: Hi, Joe!

Joe: Hi, (girl)!

Girl: I am SO EXCITED

Joe: ME TOO. I'VE BEEN WAITING ALL WEEK!!!

Girl: I KNOW!

Joe: What dipping sauces do you usually get?

Girl: wut.

Apparently there was a chorus concert that day or some shit. Anyways, here are a few reasons why chicken fingers are the best:

1. No Bones. Things with bones are fucking stupid!! Like dinosaurs!

fuck reading! I want me some chicken fingers!

2. They make vegetables taste good: I'm serious! Have you ever eaten lettuce? it's gross! But pair some lettuce with a chicken finger, and it's like it isn't even there!

3. Diversity: They come in all shapes, sizes, and colors! You have them gently fried or very crispy, long and thin to circular like chicken nuggets. Yay, diversity!

chicken fingers are color-blind

Here is how I usually make chicken fingers and a sauce I usually make with it. I just needed to express my love for the chicken finger.

Ingredients:

-Boneless chicken breasts, cut into strips OR you can just get chicken tenders pre-cut for you

-1/4 cup of milk

-1/4 cup of flour

-1 tablespoon cornstarch

-1/2 cup of cornflakes

-1/2 cup of panko bread crumbs (these are japanese style-bread crumbs and they're really flaky and nice)

-1 Egg

-Salt and pepper and whatever seasonings you want (I usually like 7 flavor chili powder) One other seasoning is probably best.

Preheat that shit to 400 degrees (I found that 375 is good for softer insides but you sacrifice the crunch on the surface. Your call, bros), or heat up some oil on high. Caution: hot oil is dangerous lol

First take the cornflakes and crush the shit out of them with your hands or a hammer or whatever. The easiest way I've found is to put them in a ziploc bag and sit on them, letting my weight crush them. Submiss them to your liking but if you're going to fry, then make sure the crumbs are very fine.

Take your chicken and cut them up into strips. The more even they are, the less you have to worry about being salmonella'd by a particularly big chunk that didn't get enough love. Season them with salt and pepper. You can marinate them for an hour in whatever marinade you like (My basic Asian marinade is really just white sugar, honey, soy sauce, sesame oil, and ground ginger) but these are fucking chicken fingers not thanksgiving dinner.

Crack the egg and beat it until it becomes that nice orange beaten color. Add the milk. This is your adhesive.Then sift the flour and cornstarch together. Starch is amazing. Also, take your crushed up cornflakes and then mix them in with the panko bread crumbs. Keep a clean workspace!

Then take a chicken finger, roll it around in the flour/cornstarch until they are lightly covered and then dip it in the egg and milk mixture. Quickly transfer to your crumb mixture (it is easiest to have this on a tray or something) and then cover them in delicious crumbs. Repeat with all the chickens.

Now, you can FRY or BAKE! Bake is at 400 degrees for crispiness, 375 for chicken juiciness. There is actually a big trade-off between these two types so choose wisely. 10-12 minutes for 400 degrees, a 17-20 minutes for 375.

Or you can FRY, which is really the best and should be the only option. Heat up a pan of oil (if you don't feel comfortable deep-frying, that's okay. Just have enough oil that you can cook half of the finger at a time. Heat it until a bit of breadcrumb dropped into it will start sizzling in that beautiful frying way. And then Add in 3-4 chicken fingers at a time (crowding the pan will reduce the heat) and then cook in there until GOLDEN BROWN. I usually estimate estimated time of completion at this point, but always by the time you get that nice brown color all round then they're definitely done.

Put them on a plate with a paper towel to let them drain.

Here is my favorite sauce to go along with this stuff:

1 Tbsp of BBQ Sauce

1 Tbsp of Ketchup

1 Tbsp of Soy Sauce

1/2 Tbsp of sugar

1/2 tbsp honey

Warning: The sauce is Asian

Food

I like to say that Koreans are to Asians as Italians are to White people. It's true! Think about it.

Some of you might not be able to fully comprehend this statement because you have never encountered a real live Korean mother. Here's a taste of some wisdom from Jung Ok Rim:

1. DONT EXPOSE YOUR STOMACH TO THE COLD YOUR UTERUS WILL DRY UP.

2. STOP STARING AT YOUR COMPUTER SCREEN, THE MAGNETS WILL RUIN YOUR BRAIN

3. DO YOU WANT YOUR MOTHER TO DIE? EAT ALL YOUR FOOD.

These are paradigmatic Korean mother phrases for many different reasons. Beyond the all-caps (factory settings for Korean people), here's a breakdown.

1. Korean mothers will do whatever it takes to make sure they have over 9000 grandchildren. Also, this was directed at my little sister, not me. I always cover up my uterus.

2. Anything that prevents you from getting into medical school should be treated like large piles of nuclear waste from Kim Jong Il's anus.

3. Food is love

My mom taught me EVERYTHING I know about making food. Here are some helpful words from my mom, on food:

"Only white people use measuring spoons."

"The reason why Americans are fat is because they don't eat kimchi. Did you know kimchi stopped SARS from spreading into Korea? It's true."

"Don't eat ice cubes! You will become cold on the inside like your cello teacher."

"If I ever stopped loving you, you would know because I would stop sending you mangos by airmail"

A lot of my conversations with my mother have been about food. How to make it, present it, store it, and serve it. A lot of times, I ask for recipes for things I ate when I was a kid. Some people have their mac and cheese and turkey dinner and cheeseburgers, but for me, nothing beats a steaming bowl of rappoggi, kalbi bibimbap, or an icy glass of shikhae.

BAM HOW ABOUT THAT? TOO ETHNIC FOR YOU?!

I think my mom really likes hearing about instances when I make her recipes at Brown or when I expose other people to Korean food. She's always been a little scared that I would turn to more American tastes, which in her opinion is at once "too bland and too salty." Mom, like it or not, spicy fermented cabbage will always be a part of my life. I'll write down as many recipes as I can from you, and someday I'll be able to make them without even thinking. One day I'll be able to do what you do and do crazy things like crush garlic with your fist or remove things from the oven with your bare hands.

I remember once thinking that my mom was not a good cook because she never measured anything out and put her hands in everything. All the people on TV had fancy machines and measuring spoons and scales and things that separated the yolks and the whites and they had pristine kitchens and used big things with lots of attachments to mix things. I once asked my mom while she was making homemade flour noodles why she never used a recipe. I clearly remember what she said, roughly translated: "If you need a recipe, you're not a real cook."

I tell people about this and they respond, "Oh, but not with baking!" My response: You're probably not that good at baking, then.

Jung Ok Rim: "If it's made of pure sugar and butter and it tastes bad, then you are a failure."

"What about SOUFFLES?"

Jung Ok Rim: "What's a souffle? HAVE SOME KIMCHI"

Word, mom.

This blog is dedicated to you and your no-nonsense food. You're the best cook in the world.