Food: Korean chicken wings to pig intestines

Phillip and I haven't just been walking and climbing stairs and traveling on trains, we've been eating. Time to show what delicious, and not quite delicious, food we've come across.

These are chicken wings. The entire wing in one piece, including the tip end. Phillip ordered 10 wings, not realizing that they meant "wing" not just a piece of a wing like in the US. He liked the sauce on them but they weren't as crispy as they look in the picture so he wasn't too crazy about these.

This is chicken galbi, a chicken dish that was served piping hot at our table. The boneless chicken chunks were cooked with kim chee and onions and a particular sauce. It is not grilled, more like stir-fried, but with the sauce it was almost like stewed chicken. A bit spicier than some of the other dishes we ate, but not too spicy.

Kim chee stew with tofu and beef. Again, not too spicy. When kim chee is cooked, its flavor changes a bit and it is certainly less pungent. Kim chee stew comes with the sides, so we get uncooked kim chee of different varieties.

And of course the snacks. This is ice cream, chocolate in one end and vanilla in the other. It looks likes he's snorkeling with his ice cream cone.

I put a picture of a sugar pancake, my favorite snack, already in a post, but it was of the entire pancake. You've got to see the melted brown sugar and cinnamon on the inside! 

Sandwiches are sold in Korea. This is a bacon and egg sandwich with bacon sauce. Yep, bacon sauce! It was a sweet sauce that probably used bacon fat for flavor. I found this on Jeju and just had to try it. Probably not too healthy, but quite tasty.

I've seen this back at home, green tea ice cream, but it is a flavor choice at every ice cream vendor, very popular here.

This is my favorite entre - bibimbap. I especially love it served in these hot storeware pots. The lower layer (you can't see it) is rice. Then all manner of veggies are arranged in piles on top. This would include bean sprouts, some type of kim chee, nori pieces (dried seaweed, sheets of which are used to wrap sushi rolls), maybe lettuce, maybe bul go gi meat. Bibimbap is always topped with an egg. If it's served in a hot pot like this, the egg is raw. If in a plain bowl, the egg is already cooked. And the sauce- it always has a gochuchang sauce. Gochuchang is a particular savory and spicy fermented paste made of red chilis, soybeans, glutinous rice and salt. It is definitely on my grocery list when I get back home. More about this picture - it is in the hot, really hot, pot, so when you mix up the ingredients (with a spoon), the egg cooks. Also, you end the meal with crispy rice bits to scrape off the bottom of the pot.

While in Jeju, we went to Noodle Street for noodle soup. The noodles are cooked separately, I'm sure, because the broth they are served in isn't starchy. It has a very clean taste. The vegetables (you can see the carrots and green onions) are sliced smaller than matchstick size and cook when the boiling broth is poured over them. The dark topping you see is more crushed nori. It adds a savory taste, not really a fishy taste.

This is not food. When I saw it, I thought it was breath mints. Nope, when water is added, this expands and becomes a washcloth to clean your hands. I'm glad Phillip knew this, and told me, before I popped one in my mouth or I would've had a mouthful of damp paper towel!

Remember the dolharubang? the grandfather rock in Jeju? The market sold cookies baked in dolharubang-shaped molds. They tasted like fortune cookies, sweet, unspiced and crunchy.

Korea's climate is not tropical, but they do have fruit. This is an Asian pear, a huge Asian pear. It tasted fresher and less sweet, more crunchy and juicy than the ones we can buy in the USA. 

Street vendors also sell corn on the cob. This isn't roasted corn, nor is it sweet corn. It is closer to the mote we had in Ecuador, slightly sweet but more starchy with huge kernels. When I was growing up on a farm in Kentucky, we grew field corn for the cows. The taste of this corn reminded me of young field corn which still had a bit of sweetness if you sneak an ear before it gets mature.

This is a dessert Phillip found in Busan. It's a waffle on which they spread whipped cream, making sure it went into the waffle squares. Next goes sweetend cream cheese across it. Then, they fold it in half. The challenge is to eat it without the whipped cream oozing out and dropping on your shirt! We could have had it filled with ice cream, but we figured that would have been even messier. Tasty, but messy.

A specialty of Busan was egg pancakes. This is another recipe that I will try. A small amount of an egg batter is put on the griddle. A handful of thin green onions are laid across the eggs. More egg batter, then other ingredients, in this case, seafood including octupus. Then even more egg batter. By now the pancake is as big as a dinner plate. We watched the lady cook these. She used a shovel-type spatula and a regular spatula to turn it. Each time she turned it, she added a little more egg batter. When she served it, it was cooked thru, even the green onions had gotten limp and cooked. One pancake fed both of us. This was the only octupus that Phillip liked, probably because it did not end up rubbery.

We kept passing steamed dumpling vendors in the market, but Phillip said he wanted "yuki mandu," which is fried dumplings, so we never stopped. One evening, when we decided to just eat vendor food, I stopped at a steamed dumpling vendor who was doing a brisk business (that means the locals like his food) and got a mandu (this steamed dumpling) filled with veggies (mainly cooked onions and green onions) and meat for 1000 won (less than a dollar). By the time Phillip settled on kim bap for his dinner, I'd eaten my mandu so I had him go past this vendor again for me to get a second mandu. I won't be passing these by again!

On the KTX train from Busan to Daegu, a hostess came thru the railcar selling coffee and snacks. It was past lunchtime and I was hungry, so I just pointed to one of her packaged breads. It was quite good as it was a sweet bread filled with red bean paste. The filling was not too sweet and it did taste like red beans. Don't think Cajun red beans and rice - it didn't taste anything like that. There's very little I can compare it to as most of our Texas fillings are much sweeter than this, or much fruitier than this. I liked it so much that when we saw a vendor today with cookies that appeared to be filled with the red bean paste, we bought some (They were!).

And my final picture is from lunch today. This is gopchang. It is pig intestine. Cleaned well, of course, then grilled with a red chili sauce. It was excellent. Phillip and I are not really menudo fans, so we weren't sure about gopchang. Daegu has an entire street dedicated to gopchang restaurants and the hotel clerk said it was good and recommended we try it. The flavor reminded me of bacon, but not smoky bacon. It was just a little bit chewy, but the more it charred on the table grill, the less chewy and the more flavorful it got. This isn't something that I will try at home, but it was pretty darn good - a hit not a miss.