Cooking Class with Jessie

Phillip and I attended our personal cooking class with Jessie and it was wonderful! Jessie has a full-time job and is working on her PhD, but she loves to cook and speaks English very well. She learned her English from the US military TV channels and from watching US soap operas when she was a child. She has traveled to the United States and her sister lives in Los Angeles. Jessie was joined by her mother, who does not speak English, but that was fine as her mom and I could communicate with the food preparation and through Jessie. Phillip and Jessie talked while her mom and I chopped.

The above picture contains the ingredients (except the noodles) for a dish called japchae. It is the main dish that I wanted to learn how to cook. Marinated stips of meat, veggies, and mushrooms. The noodles in japchae are sweet potato glass noodles that are added to the pan after the meat and veggies get cooked.

The bowl above contains the ingredients that go into the cucumber kim chee, another dish I wanted to learn how to prepare. I've tried at home, but it never came out the way it should. One of the ingredients that I had not incuded, and is essential for the flavor, is the shrimp. The light-colored ingredient in the above picture is finely minced tiny shrimp. It doesn't make the cucmber kim chee taste fishy at all, but is

essential.

And the red pepper! All kim chee, whether cabbage, radish, cucumber, or any other, contains Korean red pepper. Jessie's mom used a plastic glove to mix the ingredients once she added the red pepper as it does stain one's hands. I used a glove when she and I stuffed this mixture into the cucumbers.

This is the rolling of the egg pancake. It contains finely diced veggies and about 1/4 cup of finely diced Spam. Think of a rolled, thick fritatta or egg pancake with veggies and seasoning. Because of all the vegetbles, it does take skill and practice to roll it as it cooks so that it doesn't fall apart on you. If it does, I expect you would have scrambled eggs with veggies instead of the rolled egg pancake! Jessie's mom knew how to do it, and it was like watching an artist as she coaxed the roll into shape.

Although my pictures so far have been of Jessie's mom's hands, Jessie also taught and of course was the one explaining and telling what her mother was doing or adding.  Here's a change: Jessie hands as she is making the soup. She boiled dried anchovies in water to create a broth then removed the anchovies and added vegetables. In the above step, Jessie is adding bean paste for seasoning, but because it may have chunks of bean she doesn't want in the soup, she is adding it thru a strainer, pressing the paste to get the "good stuff" out but leaving any solids in the strainer. 

This is our meal. We each have a bowl of rice at our place. From left to right are fried tofu (I didn't get a picture of it cooking, but it is sliced tofu fried in sunflower oil), a small bowl of sauce we prepared for the tofu, the japchae, the cucmber kim chee and the egg pancake. The soup hadn't made it to the table yet when I took this picture. All very delicious and all foods that I now feel comfortable making! I will say that my egg pancakes will probably not look as good as these, as Jessie's mom has years of experience rolling them. 

And Phillip and I seated to enjoy our meal, which included makli (not sure of the spelling) which is rice wine. Bubbly rice wine because of the fermentation. Jessie had to shake the bottle to get it mixed up, but it had the bubbles, so she had to very slowly open the bottle or it would spew out like a shaken Dr. Pepper! 

And the cooks! You've seen their hands, now here are their faces! Jessie and her mom were very gracious hosts and I learned so much from them. Jessie's class is thru an organization called "The Traveling Spoon," and you can bet that we will look for classes thru The Travelling Spoon in the future when we visit other countries. It was a wonderful experience and I highly recommend it and thank Jessie and her mother for sharing their knowledge and hospitality.

We finished our class and lunch at about 2 pm. Jessie had suggested visiting the cherry blossoms where the festival will start soon at Yeouido. We headed that way and got off at the subway stop nearest to the park, but as we walked toward the park, it began raining, enough that we sought shelter in front of an office building. We tried to wait the rain out, but when large groups of people with umbrellas passed by going away from the park, we decided to save the cherry blossoms for another day, a day when it wasn't raining cats and dogs. 

One of the subway stops on the way back to our hotel was for the Museum of Korea. All museums have free admission in Korea, so we decided to stop and view the collections. The museum collection took the people of Korea from pre-history to about 1900. It was a well organized museum and one of my favorite displays was of this Goya warrior from about 500 AD. The armor that the horses wore was intricate and fascinating, but the picture wasn't as good as this one. 

We spent several hours in the museum, then walked around the grounds. This is a view of the museum from across the small lake in front of it. Even in the drizzly rain, the bushes were blooming and you can see the pagoda in the lake. 

We enjoyed the museum, but of course the high point of the day had been the cooking class. I can't say enough good things about it - it exceeded my expectations and I am so grateful to Jessie and her mother for their hospitality.