For I know the plans I have for you; plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future...

Love is...

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails...

Good Food: Part 2

I cannot believe I was motivated enough to finish this list.

• Bon Chon Chicken (본촌 치킨) - This is not exactly a restaurant, but the food here is so popular that I decided that it had to be included in the master list. The specialty here, as the name suggests, is chicken. Traditional, Korean-style fried chicken. The difference between Bon Chon chicken and normal fried chicken from Popeyes or KFC is that the Bon Chon chicken is deep fried with little oil, leading to crispy, thin skin and tender meat. They also marinate the chicken in one of two sauces: soy or spicy pepper. You can hold the drumstick in your hand and almost none of the sauce will stick to your fingers, while "normal" fried chicken will leave an excess of oil. The unique thing about this restaurant is that the chicken is fried for exactly 30 minutes, so you order by phone 30 minutes before you want the chicken. Another thing is that almost nobody eats in-house. The norm is to order the chicken and pick it up to eat at home, school, etc.
  
  There is not much to comment on about service or the restaurant's atmosphere. The restaurant is actually in the style of a bar, which is partly the reason why people tend to just pick up the chicken and leave. They do mean it when they say 30 minutes. If you get there a little bit early and wait a few minutes, you will hear a bell ring from the kitchen at exactly 30 minutes, and your order will come out. The food is absolutely fabulous. The price: Moderate
  
  Rating: 5/5
  
  
  
• ARA Fusion Restaurant (아라 퓨전요리) - ARA is a relatively new restaurant compared to many of the others in this list. The restaurant is geared towards teenagers and young adults more than other traditional Korean restaurants. The "Fusion" in their name is supposed to mean that they serve not only Korean, but also Japanese and "fusion" dishes. They are lacking in side dishes compared to others, but the main dishes come in huge quantities. The menu boasts a wide array of foods, ranging from small appetizers like fried squid to seafood casseroles to barbecue skewers to simple ramen. "Restaurant," however, is not the accurate word to describe ARA. The food is not the focus, especially on Fridays or Saturdays - on those nights this place turns into a karaoke bar with tons of Koreans drinking and enjoying themselves. This restaurant has two ambitions: first, to be a karaoke lounge, and second, to be a restaurant. It is extremely successful in the first, but it fails to impress in the second. ARA is more of a place to snack than to dine.
  
  The restaurant plays some nice music and has a good atmosphere in general. What bothers me is that even if you sit at a smoke-free table, you can sometimes catch a whiff of smoke from a smoker in a smoking room (I have a very sensitive nose >_>). The service is nice; friendly compared to other restaurants. Although, I once had a teenage waiter who messed up the order completely... But they gave us a free dish to compensate, so it's all good. But in the end, the major part of the rating has to do with the food, and ARA needs some work in that respect. The price: Cheap-Moderate
  
  Rating: 4.4/5
  
  
  
• Vit Goel (Lighthouse) Tofu (빛고을 순두부) - Lighthouse specializes in Soondubu Jjigae, a hot and spicy stew made with tofu and vegetables. The restaurant gives a variety of options for toppings, ranging from a simple kimchi stew, to beef and pork stew, to seafood stew, to a "combination stew" that combines meat, seafood, and what have you. And of course, if you are not in the mood for this stew, you can always get the Korean BBQ, or the stir-fried spicy squid and noodles. The menu only has about 15 items, 8 of which are different varieties of the tofu stew, so you generally only come here for the soup. That being said, Lighthouse has the best tofu stew in the Northern Virginia area. For about 10 bucks, you get the stew, side dishes ranging from pickled vegetables and kimchi to a cold kinchi soup for appetizer, endless rice (they give you more if you ask for more after your first bowl), and as an added bonus, some browned rice (that results from cooking the rice in the traditional black bowls with fire) suspended in hot water (for after the meal). The place is usually crowed during lunch and dinner hours, but it's almost empty between those hours. When they give out the side dishes, everyone gets a raw egg. When you get the soup, which is still boiling and bubbling as it is placed in front of you, you are supposed to put the egg in the soup for it to poach. Just don't fail like Jack and end up with half of the shell inside the soup.
  
  They have a nice atmosphere. the chairs aren't necessarily the most comfortable to sit in, but that's just the spoiled me talking again. The service is great; the waitresses are all very nice, and they never mess up your orders! As with any Korean restaurant, you get free "refills" on side dishes and rice. The most American-friendly thing about this place is that you get a range of options for how spicy you want your soup to be, ranging from white and normal to double spicy. The price: Moderate
  
  Rating: 5/5
  
  
  
• Seoul Gooldaegee (Honey Pig) (서울 꿀돼지) - Honey Pig Restaurant is a recent phenomenon. They opened fairly recently, only a block or two away from Lighthouse Tofu. This restaurant specializes, as the name may suggest, in Korean BBQ. This restaurant is very unique. The tables are round metal tables with a large circular grill at the center. Once you make your order, the waitress brings out the raw meat to your table, and cooks the meat on the grill for you. You get the standard side dishes: sauce, if appropriate, that goes with the meat; lettuce for wrapping the meat in; raw peppers and garlic; cold kimchi soup. I've only been there once, but the food was really good. When it first opened, Honey Pig was crowded 24/7, with people waiting for hours in line. Even now, people wait in hours-long lines during dinner hours, and even at around 4-5 pm, the place is about 60% full capacity. The prices on the menu seem fairly expensive, but 4 people can share 3 servings and be extremely full, resulting in only about 10-12 dollars per person.
  
  The only thing that irks me about the place is how small the tables are. With the huge grill in the center of the table, which is small enough alone, you barely have enough room for anything. They do have larger tables, though they have the portable grills instead. Pretty hard to hear yourself talk, even with only 60% saturation, so I can't imagine how loud it must be during dinner. A word of advice: it gets really smokey inside, so leaving coats and jackets in the car would be a really good idea. The price: Moderate-Expensive
  
  
  Rating: 4.8/5
  

Cooking!

So when I was little, I wanted to be so many different things when I grew up: policeman, firefighter, artist, musician, doctor, professional chef... and the list goes on.

Obviously, at this point in my life I have little desire to be any of those things (though I do want to pick up piano again). However, one thing that I am still as passionate about now as I was back in the day is... COOKING!

I know. Total shocker, right? Who would believe that I, of all people, like to cook? Ignoring the fact, of course, that I am a huge glutton. :]

Actually, I got hooked on cooking not because of the allure of the fancy food I could make, but because of the mental challenges intertwined with it. On nights where I would finish homework at around 4 am, I would usually get really hungry, usually around midnight or 1 am. But my mom would already be asleep, and the only sounds in the house would be me typing as quietly as possible and writing as quietly as possible. What annoyed me the most about these situations was the fact that usually, when I had that much homework, it involved a writing assignment which then had to be printed. Unfortunately, my printer makes the most loud and obnoxious sounds EVER, which meant I had to email everything to myself and print them out in the syslab. Printing at the syslab was also annoying, because OOffice would often screw up the spacings of the document. But anyway, I digress...

Since I did not want to wake up my mom, I had the challenge, in addition to cooking something edible by myself (which was hard enough already), of preparing foods that did not require use of tools that made a lot of noise. This meant that among others, the microwave oven and the toaster oven that made the obnoxious ticking sounds as the timer counted down were disallowed. This certainly was a huge restriction; you can cook basically anything with a microwave! But I couldn't use such a versatile tool! Arggh!

This restriction on the available tools also placed a restriction on the types of food and ingredients I could use. Clearly I couldnt use anything my mom kept in the freezer, unless it was something I could heat up on the frying pan, without it making cracking noises. So basically, anything frozen was disallowed. Now I was left with 1. Ingredients in the fridge, and 2. Ingredients kept in the pantry.

Now the big problem was creating something edible out of the ingredients in the fridge and the pantry. When I was a novice, I had a lot of trouble with this part of the late-night cooking process. But as I started cooking more and more, I began to develop a certain level of food intuition, dealing with the ability to combine flavors and taste them together in my head (before I recklessly put everything together into something completely inedible, thus wasting food and a substantial amount of my time).

Late-night cooking was like a really fun puzzle for me. Kind of like a sudoku puzzle: Given the numbers already written in each row, column, or 3x3 square, the possible numbers that could fit in the empty spaces were restricted. And just like how mathematicians came up with theorems and formulas after "playing around" with numbers, I came up with a few recipes that I knew to be good, forever ingrained in my brain. In fact, just now I made a rice bowl with rice, fish eggs, artificial crab meat, tuna, and seasoning. It was delicious, although I had to give up about a fifth of my rice to Happy (Hey, YOU try eating the food in front of you while a cute little dog sits between your legs, looks up at you and begs. Can't do it? Thought so.)

Ranging from this sneaky way of preparing food without waking my mom, to randomly baking a vanilla cake in the middle of the day, to preparing a traditional, nasty-smelling bean curd hangover soup, my experiences with cooking have generally been positive.

I love cooking~ ^^

에덴의 동쪽

So as I looked through my previous posts I noticed that I have more posts marked draft than I do actual published posts. To appease the wrath of the readers of this blog, I decided to write about a Korean drama called East of Eden that is coming to a close, and then actually publish it (what a concept!). Don't worry, I'll keep this post is 100% spoiler-free. So you can go watch the episodes online after reading about how AWESOME it is. :D


Query: What would your reaction be if, at the age of 30, you found your long-lost brother that you haven't seen since you were 15 years old? If, in order to protect your younger brother, you dealt with gangsters, risking your own life multiple times and living your entire life to allow your brother to succeed as a prosecutor, while your mother thought that you were just a bad seed; only worthless trash?


Then, after many long years, just as things are about to settle down and the family is back together, you learn that your brother was switched at birth with the son of your arch nemesis, the man who killed your father when you were only five. You spent your life protecting the person you thought was your brother and actively trying to get revenge on the man who killed your father. Now you learn that you were protecting your enemy's kin while ruining your biological brother. What now?

Do we have to be of the same blood to be family? Does being of the same blood necessarily mean that we are family? Just what does it mean to be family?

This drama is by far the best drama I have ever watched, and is probably one of the best in the history of the genre. And trust me on that; I've seen just as many dramas, if not more, than the average Korean fangirl. East of Eden has such a complex, twisted plot with so many thought-provoking moments that I can barely write comprehensibly. What I just wrote in this post looks like complete gibberish, but I can't help it! I get so excited about sharing all of the life lessons I learned, as well as the heartwrenching things in the storyline. There's so much stuff in my mind that I can't possibly articulate everything clearly at once. So I will leave you with this sneak peek and go to bed. That's cue for you to stop reading this post and start googling websites that stream the drama. ;]

Bon soir, mes amis~

Bonkers

I am so lazy.

... :]

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