Soba Cha

A cold and drenched night calls for something toasty.  If you happen to have buckwheat groats hanging about your pantry- you can whip up some soba cha or roasted buckwheat tea. I pan roasted my raw green groats for about five minutes minutes shaking the pan from time to time. Soba cha is highly tolerant of overbrewing but you need to steep for at least three minutes- the tea is pale brown with a nutty and roasty taste that offends no one.  One can even munch on the brewed groats with some honey.


Roasted grain teas used to be the de facto beverage of Korean households as no one would drank tap water without boiling it. Instead of brewing, you let the toasted barley or corn boil in the water.  I remember as a little girl, I was asked many a times to watch the grain teas but I often let them overboil.  My mind was often occupied with grander things such as capturing a North Korean agent.  Even in elementary school we were taught the endless superpowers of a North Korean agent- they could hide in the ground given only a stainless steel spoon. My clever plans to trap such a cunning spy revolved around tricking them with ice cream and choco-pie.

Roasting grains gave me such a cosy good feeling, I may have to contrive more occasions to dry fry.

Kimchi Jigae

This humble meal of Korean kimchi stew at Berkeley's Spoon is my recent afterwork favorite.  Kimchi being a fermented food is in various stages of ripeness and hence the stew or jigae made from it can only be slightly different each time. I prefer mine quite stinky, sour, and past the point of ripe but restauarants tend to serve them rather young. It takes much time and space  to have your kimchi ferment.

Now that I've adopted away our chickens, I could bury the urns full of kimchi in the back yard as my grandmother used to do. I rarely have kimchi at home as storing kimchi in your fridge ruins your house. Kimchi exudes a garlic odor so pungent no amount of cleansing will wipe away that happy smell.

Not much to report on the tea front.  My kettle chronicles however continue well into 2014. After I returned from Baja, I noticed my beloved electric kettle was missing and an unexpected box from Amazon it it's place.  We had let some dear friends stay during our absence and somehow someone had mistakenly(??!??) heated the plastic-bottomed kettle on a gas stove. I had never imagined such a sad end for a faithful contraption which heated a gallon of water daily for over 14 years.  I'm back to boiling water on the stove as no amount of research has turned up a worthy alternative.

Ippuku

I took an old friend from Hong Kong to Berkeley's Ippuku which goes beyond a yakitori joint. One of their more novel dishes is a chicken tartare served with a raw quail egg on top.  Who's afraid of raw chicken sushi?  Even as a Korean- raw chicken flesh is something I've never properly had.  I've only enjoyed raw chicken skin and heart with sesame oil as a child.   I've been putting off this particular delicacy for quite a while now only because I couldn't get anyone to share it and I didn't want to have to eat an entire bowlful by myself.

The flesh is quite sweet and tastes like sushi.  It turns out my friend somehow managed to evade this special experience without me noticing.  I think once is enough for me as I find their raw scallops or uni to be a tastier treat.  We also enjoyed grilled beef tongue, chicken heart, chicken liver and pig intestines with numerous cups of soba/buckwheat tea.  I might toast my own buckwheat groats at home and start drinking more soba tea as it's nutty and healthful.

  

Chestnut creme noodles was their seasonal dessert.  A visual pun on soba, this piece of deliciousness also hid  a dollop of creme and spongecake inside.  Ippuku means to take a break and so this meal gave us a definite respite from the endless taco and ceviche parade in Mexico but I'm ready to go back to topopos and salsa.

Welcoming the New Year in Baja

I've been busily chasing sea critters up and down the Sea of Cortez since the new year. 2014 will be the year of the horse- a time for wild wanderings and adventure. I thought I would get the earliest possible start in Baja California- a land filled with remote corners accessible only by boat.  There is no tea culture there as cold beer appears to be the drink of choice and I routinely swilled bagged tea in the mornings to get the job done.

I'm too blasted from the flight to write but please feel free to click on the image above to see my initial photos from the trip. The above are mobula rays who migrate through Cabo Pulmo during the winter.  I had been quite mentally depleted on arrival but drifting above these lovely manta rays cured me. 

Pan Asian Blend

A decade ago, I started saving my spare funds for a lifetime trip which would trace my ancestral heritage through millennia. I had planned to go from Manchuria and end up in Mongolia. Most Koreans assume that the peninsula was settled from the north by way of China with a mix from the Mongol invasion. But now I have actual DNA results, I am at a loss.

Even though I am 100% ethnically Korean, according to new analyses from 23andme, my ancestors as of 500 years ago were tad more Japanese than they were Korean. My family hails from the very southern tip of the peninsula less than 160 miles away from Japan. Even 500 years ago, 160 mile stretch of water could be readily traversed by even small fishing boats so such race mixing should not at all be shocking news.  

However given the history of World War II,  uncovering a Japanese heritage was not exactly welcome news. My great grand uncle who was studying abroad in Tokyo was force drafted as a kamikaze pilot.  My great grandmother was forever heartbroken over his early demise. My grandfather was imprisoned by the Japanese about to be shipped off to slave labor in Japan.  Thankfully he was spared after my grandmother plead his case by presenting an exquisite cedar box filled with moss and fish to the Japanese district prefect.  My grandfather was simply allowed to perform the hard labor at home. 

It's rather uncomfortable news to know that you share common ancestors with a race that directly oppressed your family members and countless other countrymen.  If my grandfather were alive, he would probably refuse to believe he had any Japanese heritage at all.  And would the Japanese who perpetrated the war crimes upon the Koreans behave any differently knowing they had shared ancestry?

What to make of such a revelation? Well, it clears up the mystery of being mistaken for being a Japanese tourist in Korea and being mistaken for being Japanese in Japan. I think the worst identity crisis wrought by genetic testing was a case of a black American who turned out not to have African ancestry- no more than any other human. He descended from ancestors from the Middle East making him question his whole notion of himself as an African American.  

But 500 years past is distant enough that I need not agonize over my Korean identity too much.  Despite any genetic heritage surprises lurking, I'm now legally and culturally a tax-paying American.