bulgogi

Last Wednesday, I met my friend, Kazumi for a lesson. She then invited me to dinner. It seems that she had travelled to Korea last month with some friends and learned how to make bulgogi from a well-known chef. (This photo was taken by Kazumi at the lesson.)

After coming back from the trip, she had been wanting to try the recipe and had gotten all the ingredients together, but her husband was suddenly invited out for a night of drinking, this was why I happened to be invited.

In Japan, it is often the case where businessmen invite each other out for drinks and dinner at the last minute, this is called tsukiai, sometimes it is for business, but most times it is just a reason to get together for drinks....whether they tell their wives they don't need dinner is a matter of how well-trained they are or just the plain fear of what will happen if they don't...

Ask Satoshi and he will say that for businessmen, tsukiai is the most important law to participate in this because it is their way to communicate with each other. A slang terminology of this is called nomunication--nomu = drink + communication.

Still, it was nice to be able to eat dinner with someone, not alone like my usual weekdays.

Kazumi prepared the marinade and soaked the meat for 1/2 an hour.

After cooking it, she basted the meat with honey and served it with greens. It was delicious.

I emailed her for the recipe, but she hasn't responded yet, hopefully I'll be able to get the name of her teacher and the recipe.

While having dinner, Kazumi gave me some kim chee that she had, this one was kind of "a deluxe type" with all kinds of vegetable, nuts and even squid inside.

To go along with the kim chee, I decided to try to make bulgogi for tonight's dinner with the help of my friend, Sue's recipe. NOTES: I used meat for kalbi instead of for bulgogi. I grated apple instead of pear for the marinade. And I also left out the green pepper in the sauce because I didn't know what to substitute it with.

I should mention that Satoshi doesn't care much for Korean food, but he really enjoyed these dishes. (The kim chee seems to be getting hotter and hotter as each day passes.) To cool off our mouths, we had some dark chocolate covered mac nuts from my favorite, Big Island Candies for dessert.

Just wanted to show you some candies that I found at the convenience store--Tirol chocolates with a hanafuda motif. Hanafuda is a card game which uses the different flowers of the four seasons in Japan. Satoshi says that when he was growing up 3 of these chocolates were just 10 yen. Times have changed since then, these were 21 yen each. Apparently, the manufacturer had to make them bigger to fit the bar codes onto the package for convenience stores (not very convenient, huh?). These were aoume(green plum) flavor--a white chocolate dyed green with a pectin jelly center--Satoshi and I agree they didn't taste very good.

This little pink tulip is coming up amongst the bright orange ones, cute, yeah?

Well, it has been raining very hard the past couple of nights, with lightining and thunder. I hope this weather clears up soon, so that the sakura(cherry blossoms) can bloom and we can enjoy them!

Have a nice week!