Follow the River North

I’m barely into it yet, and I can already see that food blogging is a funny thing. It’s been interesting for me because for the first time I have to actively think about what I’m doing in the kitchen. I have chronic eyeball-it-itis. I caught it from my female family elders. Unless I’m baking something I don’t know well (and let’s be honest, sometimes not even then), I don’t really measure and I definitely don’t use a timer. In my family we relied more on the “that looks alright/that don’t look right” method, followed closely by the “that tastes alright/that don’t taste right” theory of cooking.

So when I see things like, “Click through to find out how to make this awesome yogurt bowl!” I just think, well, or I could just look at the photo and kind of figure it out, really. It’s a bowl of yogurt.

But if there’s anything learning to cook Korean food has taught me, it’s that easy is subjective. For example, kimchi bokkeumbap (kimchi fried rice) is the standard example trotted out as a food that even the most clueless of Korean bachelors can manage, yet it took me a good couple of years to get it exactly right. On the other hand, Korean brands of oatmeal have just started appearing in shops here. They have helpful names, like, “아침에 먹는 오트밀” (Oatmeal That’s Eaten in the Morning) to help clue less hip-to-it Koreans in on what they’re for.

I recently watched Cooked, a miniseries with food writer and journalist Michael Pollan, who I really, really like. He has a semi-Marxist stance on food and food production that I fully jive with, and he really knows his stuff in general. But the scene where he makes kimchi is an abomination.

Similarly, we were at a pretty hip restaurant in Berlin when I spotted a roasted half chicken with “Korean flavored sauerkraut” on the menu. I obviously had no choice but to order it.

You know the little packets of duck sauce you get with American takeout Chinese food? It tasted like a nicer, vinegary version of that. Not a single thing about it was Korean. But it was delicious.

The point is, easy is subjective, and so is authenticity. And I wouldn’t want to live in a world without happy mistakes. My kimchi bokkeumbap still isnt 100% Korean style, but that’s okay, because it’s rendered B incapable of eating bokkeumbap anywhere but at home — he likes mine better.

That having been said, it’s hard to find a balance between innovation and realistic expectations. I don’t think I’d be prone to follow a recipe for lavender-infused, whiskey-caramel chocolate cupcakes topped with cinnamon roasted pumpkin seeds and cherry blossom cream cheese frosting even if I were in the US, let alone in Korea where ingredients hunting is taken to a whole other level. But then again, does the internet really need another berry muffin recipe? It sure doesn’t need anymore detailed instructions on how to make a yogurt bowl or avocado toast.

But it’s good that the whole spectrum is out there, because everyone is in a different place. That person who  has only ever baked from a box, who one day decides to try something new — they may need another berry muffin recipe. Me, and my decade-long struggle with how to chop an onion without having to vacuum the entire kitchen afterward — I need that seemingly pointless video on Youtube about how to do it properly. And even bokkeumbap or oatmeal can be hard, when you didn’t grow up watching your mother make it.

For me, anything that moves us closer to our labor, closer to being more directly involved with the things we produce and consume, is good. Getting your hands dirty and doing something for yourself moves you closer to self-reliance and an understanding of what you’re really capable of. It undermines a system that has been creeping across the globe at an alarming rate, telling us we have to go and sit in a chair in an office for hours and hours everyday doing a thing we may not even care about to get a paycheck to take to the store and buy boxes and shiny packages we’re directed toward by advertising that tells us that we can’t do it ourselves — we’re too busy and tired from sitting in a chair in an office all day.

That having been said, absolutely nobody needs a recipe for avocado toast.