I got to my friends’ house tonight to hang out for Thanksgiving, and one of the first things they mentioned was “Nox’s Boxes”. Yes, my care packages from Mom arrived 🙂 I was expecting most of it, but I was really, really touched by the little things she included. She sent some of our traditional Christmas decorations, and The Polar Express book that we read every Christmas Eve… She sent our Christmas stockings! Intriguingly stuffed… — even one for Hooligan! I almost cried… Thanks Mom 🙂 🙂 🙂
A Little Math
I bought beef yesterday. I wanted to make beef stew and chili, so I needed beef. 340 grams of ground beef cost me 12,000W, and the beef stew meat was on sale for 3,480W per 100 grams. In Imperial? I spent about 12 bucks on 3/4 a pound of hamburger, and the stew meat was on sale for about $15 per pound. Yeah…
Yay Chocolate Chip Cookies!
As soon as we got our oven, Haley wanted to make chocolate chip cookies. We didn’t actually get around to it until the next weekend, but when we did, the cookies tasted great. Alas, they were only about a millimeter thick, but they were very yummy :-/ So I figured I needed to adjust my recipe; maybe add more flour so it wouldn’t spread out so much in the oven. This has happened to me before, though never to such an extreme. I make good oatmeal cookies, but I’ve never made a batch of chocolate chip cookies I was proud of… Meanwhile, I happened across a chocolate chip cookie recipe online that claimed to be for Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies, written by the folks who made my favorite cookbook (thanks Grandma!). Naturally, I had to try it! Holy moly, I’ve finally made thick, chewy, delicious cookies!!!
The recipe only makes about 20 cookies, so I’ll need to make another batch (or two…) so I can bring some cookies to school to share with all the people who helped me get my oven 🙂 🙂 🙂 Meanwhile, I suggest you click on the Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies and give them a try yourself 🙂
Mushroom Soup
Today I found mushroom soup in the store. This is a big deal, because Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup was at the top of my “American Products” wishlist. However, one of my co-workers told me that a local convenience store had Campbells, and another mentioned, “Don’t waste too much money — they have packages of mushroom soup mix here that are pretty good.” So I went to the convenience store armed with my iPod, and played pictionary/charades with the sales clerk. Drawing with my fat finger on an iPod touch is not an exercise in precision, but it’s a lot better than nothing!
They did not, apparently, have Campbell’s soups. I wandered every aisle before asking for help, and couldn’t locate any. But she *did* have the mushroom soup packets! $1.50 apiece, they make about 4 cups of mushroom soup 🙂 I have no idea how they taste on their own, but I used one tonight to make chicken/mushroom/rice casserole, and it turned out very well 🙂
I’m so glad that a) I have an oven and b) the weather has cooled off enough that I can *use* it without dying!
Saturday we’re walking to school at 6am to hop on a bus to Haley’s soccer tournament. After she plays soccer all day, we’re going to hop in Ivy’s car (she’s driving rather than riding in the bus) and we’re driving up to Seoul for the rest of our 3 day weekend 🙂 So I’ll be able to pick up my garb etc that is cluttering up some nice person’s house and meet the SCA people I’ve been corresponding with.
Hopefully while we’re up there I can find a cell phone company that is used to dealing with foreigners so I can arrange to get an iPhone 5 when they come out!
Meanwhile, I have to do this weekend’s lesson planning tonight and tomorrow, since I won’t be around to do it this weekend…
Holy expensive soccer gear, Batman!
Haley will be going to play in a soccer tournament this weekend, so it was immediately necessary to purchase soccer gear for her. Although we were told that this particular event the kids would not be wearing cleats (artificial turf), she will probably need them for the next game. And no shinguards = no game for Haley, so off we went to purchase a soccer kit. Any US soccer fans out there are smiling and nodding at this point, but the rest of you may be confused. Every fall in the US marks a nice sale in the sporting goods stores: for $30 – $40 you get a package deal on soccer cleats, shin guards, and a ball. Not super high quality, but the kids outgrow the cleats *long* before they wear out anyhow…
Fast forward to Korea… No soccer kits. You have to buy everything separately. The cleats look the same, but the shinguards are these little plastic things you shove down your socks. No elastic, no ankle protection, and they only cover about half of a tall kid’s shin… We headed down to eMart to check out the soccer gear there. The shinguards were the same dinky little things, but at least they had cleats in her size (9 – Mens!) The cheapest pair of cleats? $59 (this is the *sale* price!). So I order some american-style shinguards online. Together with a soccer ball, they cost $24. They came in two colors, black and white. My school secretary was helping me order, and she was very surprised when I ordered the black ones. “But Haley is girl!” “Yes, but she’s playing *soccer*! White gets too dirty and ugly. Black is better. Also, they will match her shoes.” This last argument was probably the most potent for her… Though she probably thinks we’re crazy for buying black shoes for a girl…
Hooligan
In case you were wondering, this is why I can’t keep my floors clean…
Seriously, I’m having trouble finding a kind of kitty litter that I like. There are really only 3 choices. There’s clumping clay litter, absorbant crystals, and (my vet ordered this just for me) *flushable* clumping clay litter, made of finer particles. I like it the best out of all three by far. Unfortunately, so does Hooligan…
Culture Shock
Umm, yummy pizza with cheezy bites 🙂 Hey, wait a minute… This tastes like… You mean that orange stuff isn’t cheese… it’s sweet potato?!?! AAAUUUGGGHHHH!*
*No, no I’m not fond of sweet potato. However, even Haley, who is, did not care for the cheezy sweet potato bites :p
Momentous Weekend
On Thursday my new (to me!) oven was delivered 🙂 Then the lady from the gas company arrived to hook it up on Saturday. Alas, they apparently don’t have y connectors here, so I can’t have my new stove/oven and my old range top hooked up to the gas at the same time :p So the gas lady cut off the old range top’s gas line and then attached the hose for my stove/oven. It’s a pretty nice stove. 4 burners, a (tiny!) oven and even a broiler. It looks like I can select whether I want the flame above or below the food in the broiler. Neat!
Saturday afternoon we walked to the farmer’s market. I got my Korean friend, Hye Sun, to tell me the words, and then I walked down the street asking people “farmer’s market?” in an inquisitive tone of voice and getting them to point me in the right direction. Finally we found it 🙂 It was pretty neat 🙂 It was a permanent structure so that the merchants don’t have to worry about rain, and many of them had a permanent storage structure/shop, but most of them had their goods spread out in front. As we walked in, we could see a bunch of American products in the store to our left. It turned out to be a kind of kitchen store, which is exactly what the owners of a new oven need! Muffin tins, pot holders, baking dishes, parchment paper, a rolling pin… It’s astonishing how much kitchen stuff we needed! Our best find was a pile of “handkerchiefs” — we bought 14 of them for $7 and now we have cloth napkins!!!! This has really been bugging me, so it might be second only to our new oven as my favorite part of this weekend 🙂 $160 later, we asked the shopkeepers if we could leave our two giant bags of stuff there while we browsed the rest of the market!
We passed a fruit vender, and got a bag of nectarines for $5, and then picked up some mushrooms for $2 🙂 I expressed interest in a weird product, and ended up inadvertently spending $3 on something I’m almost positive I’m not going to eat. And I still have no idea what it’s called! Anyhow, the market was fun, although it ended up being very expensive…
Then back home to drop off our stuff and eat a quick (and very late) lunch. Then on to Emart. My first stop was to try to get my Emart card validated — I’d gotten one last time but didn’t have time to stop by the service desk and get the paperwork filled out. So I walked up to the service desk, only to be told by the nice lady that she was signing people up for credit cards, and the service desk was over there. Oops. So I went to the service desk and got my paperwork filled out. Koreans have very small signatures, so it’s hard to fit an American signature into the box. I signed it 4 or 5 times, with no idea what I was promising. I guess they’ll be by to pick up Haley any day now… Then, as I was walking back into the main part of the store, I paused by the credit card desk… You see, I have no use for a Korean credit card, EXCEPT Costco here ONLY accepts cash or credit cards. Nobody here uses checks, and Costco doesn’t accept debit cards :p And shopping with cash isn’t much fun because I have to keep up a running total to make sure I don’t get to the register with too much stuff :p So I decided to sign up for a credit card too! It’s supposed to arrive to Tuesday — we’ll see how that goes. I got a free polka dot tote bag for signing up with the credit card company; Haley immediately claimed it. I also got a free gift with the Emart card. I’m pretty sure it’s dish soap; I guess I’ll find out when I try to use it *grin*
Then we got to try to figure out clay. I know that in the US we have several kinds of clay. The two big contenders are Playdoh and clay. Haley has to make a model of the Earth (crust, mantle, core, etc) and Playdoh won’t be good cause it doesn’t really harden up properly. So we got some help and hopefully what we picked will work. Then on the the kitchen section where we picked up a cookie sheet and a tiny pizza pan. Finally downstairs to the grocery section. Apparently they don’t have pancake syrup anymore (they did last month) which was a bit of a blow, since we just bought a *huge* bag of pancake mix at Costco :p Also, they have a zillion kinds of flour and I’m having a hard time telling them apart. Who knew that cookies required a different kind of flour than noodles? Stranger yet, it’s the noodle flour that has “All Purpose” on it in English, though I am definitely taking that with a grain of salt. I bought both just in case! Speaking of salt, all the salt here seems to be sea salt. It’s not bad, just different.
Finally, we took a taxi back home. Since it was already 8:30 and we were both pretty tired, my plans of making a potpie out of the leftover chicken stew crashed and burned into the reality of a “forage for yourself” night.
Sunday dawned. I’m sure it did, but I didn’t see it until much later, since I had stayed up until 3 researching pie crust on the internet. You see, my favorite pie crust recipe requires shortening. Shortening may or may not exist here, but I haven’t seen it. So I needed to figure out how to make a pure butter pie crust. I actually found a great recipe online, called The Food Lab: The Science of Pie Dough. Yeah, it turns out to be written by one of the guys who helped write my awesome cookbook that’s got all the whys and hows and “what happens if you try it this way”s of cooking 🙂 So that’s the pie crust I ended up making today. It turned out pretty well, I think. Flakier than my usual pie crust for sure. I think it was maybe a little overdone, since I like my crust a little moister… I think I need to calibrate my oven… The only number on the dial that’s still legible is 200˚ C. Which is great, since that’s the temp at which I wanted to bake my pie crust. However, it didn’t get done and didn’t get done so I ended up just turning it up a bit. I’m not sure how much each of the rest of the tick marks is worth, so I’m not sure what temp I ended up at. Maybe a thermometer should be my next purchase.
I tried going to the health food store, while I was chilling my pie crust dough between making it and baking it. However, the store owner didn’t have any of the things I was looking for. No coconut oil, no flax seeds, no Dr. Bronner’s soap, no henna. She sent me to a cosmetics store on the next block that very definitely didn’t have any of that eco-friendly stuff 🙁 I’m a bit worried about that, because there’s no way my flax seeds will last me a whole year, and my hair is desperately in need of a touch-up henna job :p As a country mouse, I tend to think that cities will have lots of big stores. It seems that (in Busan, at least) they just have a ton of small stores, so that each neighborhood is like a small town. So the quest for a hippie store continues…
Anyhow, after all that business about buying the clay, Mom mentioned on Skype that I could just mix salt and flour and water to make baker’s clay. Duh! A good thing too, as we didn’t buy nearly enough of the official stuff. Luckily I had a big bag of flour. I’m not sure what kind, though Hye Sun says it’s not the regular flour I thought it was. It makes great dough though:) Alas, we ran out of salt (yes, that bag I *just* bought!) and when Haley ran downstairs with our empty bag of sea salt, the basement claimed not to have any. So we’ll have to buy more salt to make more dough tomorrow. Yes, a half-sphere that is 20 cm across uses a *lot* of dough!
Oven & Power Outage
Yay, we got our oven! Today after school the delivery guys got the extra stove+oven from the basement of the school and brought it to my apartment. Yay, now I have an oven. Hopefully the gas company can send someone over tomorrow so I can have a *working* oven *grin*. Anyhow, when we got to my place, the power was out. I wasn’t able to find out why until the power came back on so I could look it up on the internet. I did bump into one of my students outside (woohoo, someone who speaks English!!!) and he told me that he was on the phone and he had friends in Seoul who were also without power. I couldn’t imagine what could cause the power to go out across a whole country! Part of the problem is that I forget that Korea is more the size of Kentucky or Indiana, and states in the US have been known to have a statewide power outage.
Apparently, several Korean power plants thought the hot summer weather was over, so they shut down for some maintenance before needing to supply power for winter weather. Unfortunately, the temps came back up; it was 85˚ (30˚ C) all night in my apartment, and it got hotter during the day. So lots of air conditioners got used and the national power level dropped so low they had to cut off power to certain areas. Now it’s back up, but there’s no guarantee the power will stay on — they might have to cut it off again to avoid a national shutdown.
Happily our stove is gas, so we’d be able to cook. Unfortunately, our fridge won’t do so well. Alas, I don’t have large quantities of ice, nor do I know where to buy ice locally. So for the sake of my groceries (and my internet connection) I hope the power stays on 🙂
Praying Mantis
Today we found a praying mantis hanging onto the bars outside Haley’s window. I guess he must have climbed up. Haley didn’t want him hanging out outside her window all night, so I caught him to release him back down on the ground. Well, that was the plan! I caught him, but underestimated how amazingly fast praying mantises can sprint! So he got away, and crawled under Haley’s bed. Oh yeah. If outside her window is bad, releasing him under her bed earns me “Worst Mom of the Year Award”. So I picked up her mattress and eventually found and caught him. This time I covered up the glass with a piece of paper since he can climb the unclimbable! We took a photo and a movie, so you could see him too, and then released him downstairs.
