Korea Life Blog - Bap Sot



Well, here it is. My brand new Cuckoo rice cooker. It cost me a mere 50,000 won at E-mart. (Is it me, or does E-mart sound quite similar to K-mart?) It really is a wise investment and sure to save me money from eating out all the time. I cooked up a batch (right word?) of rice the same night I got it. These things are amazing. They cook the rice to a perfect texture and then keep it warm and moist with steam for almost 2 days. When the batch I made started to get a little hard I mixed up the remainder with some tuna and put it out for the cats in a big bowl. The next day it was all gone. Now I'm eating rice for breakfast, something a few years ago would have sounded preposterous to me. The other morning I made mi yuk guk (sea weed soup) and ate it with kimchi and tomatoes. A wonderfully healthy breakfast. Again, the thought of eating sea weed soup and rice for breakfast would have made me laugh before...but now it seems, well, quite natural. Skeptics may cringe, but it's true.

I'm excited at all the new dishes I can now cook up. Last night I made sam gyeop sal, and tonight I made plain rice and ate it with processed seaweed, kimchi, spicy leaves, and tater tots. Tomorrow or the next day I may make some kimchi chigae of dwen jang chigae.



As for kimchi, I've become highly addicted. For the past 3 months, I've been consuming about 1 KG per week, which doesn't include what I munch down at the restaurants. (By the way, I also find myself thinking in the metric system more and more. It just makes better sense.) Until I got the rice machine I was eating the red delight with french fries, ramyon noodles, mandu, eggs, or whatever else was in the fridge. I even put it on my hamburgers in place of cheese. It goes well with everything, in my opinion. I eat it with breakfast, lunch and dinner. I've even woken up in the middle of the night to gobble down a few pieces. It's absolutely delicious. Yes, you may think I've been in Korea too long, but it sure beats everything else I used to consider appealing in terms of healthiness. The only thing I worry about is whether I'm consuming too much salt now.