Food!

I want to apologize for the lack of food pictures.  I've been slacking.  It's mostly because I'm hungry whenever my food arrives in a restaurant and I start eating immediately. Korean food is delicious and I don't have time to wait to take a picture.

So, the guy who lived in my apartment before me wasn't the cleanest of dudes.  The apartment was cleaned by a cleaning service, but they didn't wash the dishes...or the sauce/spice bottles sitting on a little shelf above the stove.  Grease and grime everywhere.  Between work and meeting up with friends and/or coworkers outside of work, I haven't had a ton of time to clean the kitchen.  If it were just a normal amount of cleaning I'd have been done long before now, but I have to scrub. And scrub. And scrub.  He left food storage containers that were wonderfully sturdy and looked really nice...except they were dirty.  After scrubbing one for 10 minutes to no avail and realizing that the rest of them were the same, I just pitched them.  I'll get my own, thank you, and I'll keep them not-nasty.

Tonight, I finally finished washing all the dishes, utensils, the main cabinet above the sink, the spices/sauces, the itty bitty kettle, and the two pots (both tiny).  There's still a lot to do, but it's enough that I can start making my own food instead of going out to eat every night.  I have a brand-new rice cooker, but I still have to wash the bowl and muddle my way through the instructions.  The previous tenant left me a few food items in the cabinet (including ramyun, curry mix, chicken bouillon packs, and some coffee).  I also have a few basic groceries, like rice, potatoes, onions, hot peppers (and hot pepper powder), garlic, and a couple other small things.  I have to keep it small, because my fridge here is about the same size as my dorm fridge back at OSU and I only have the one cabinet.

I was planning on attempting to make 부대찌개 (army stew) tonight, but I had last-minute company and we sat chatting until about 11. At that point I didn't really want to bother with all the prep, so I decided to make one of the two packs of ramyun that the previous tenant left me.  I threw in some 떡 (ddeok - the best way to describe it is that it is ddeok.  It's a sticky rice cake and it is easily one of my favorite foods in the world) and have now officially made (and eaten) my first-ever home cooked meal in Korea.

Even if it was just ramyun.