Bon Appegeek

Good grief, where have I been? This post is late late late, but here’s the problem with food blogging. By the time you post about a food in season—especially when you don’t live in California—that season is nearly over. So really, most posts about certain foods should be stored away for next [...]

It’s spring! What better way to commemorate a season of daffodils and violets than with baby pictures?¹ My cousin’s daughter (who is my first cousin once removed, but I’ll refer to her as my niece consistent with Korean genealogy²) recently celebrated her first birthday. Koreans use first birthdays as an excuse to [...]

My 33rd birthday is coming up. A few weeks ago my mother, a salt & pepper-haired woman fast approaching her 60s, looked at my hair and said, “You have as much white hair as I do.”
“WHAT?”
“In the back there, I see a lot of white hairs.”
“NO YOU DON’T.”
“Yes I—”
“YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO TELL YOUR DARLING [...]

The following message is brought to you by the Tofu Anti-Defamation League.
Tofu fights cancer. Tofu causes cancer. Tofu gives you the gift of flight. Tofu forces you to grow a second head. Tofu is the only food that can drive back the skeletal armies of the undead should the devastating curse [...]

Let them eat perilla seed cake.
— Marie Antoinette Kim
I’m predicting the Next Big Thing. In a year or two, big restaurants will pounce on deulkkae and turn it into the trendy new food ingredient of the decade. Why wouldn’t they? It tastes like nothing else, few in the west have heard of [...]

Eating animals with more than four legs didn’t seem Weird until I turned ten. I often played with dried cuttlefish, a popular Korean snack called ojingo, the way that most kids play with string cheese. Ojingo’s powdery dried flesh has a horizontal grain that easily shreds into feathery strands that paint your tongue [...]

Once upon a time, a poor widow answered a knock on her cottage door and found a wanderer begging for a bite to eat. Despite having little food left for herself, she scraped up what was left in her pantry and made a soup with the last of her butter. The wanderer, only [...]

Back from my road trip! And what better welcome home than finding that the photograph from my inaugural post, The birds & the (non-) berries placed third in the Originiality category of the Does My Blog Look Good In This contest, hosted last month by Grab Your Fork. I’m truly surprised—as an amateur [...]

My cousin left her family’s farm in rural South Korea (motto: modern plumbing, schmodern plumbing) more than two decades ago to live with our family in Illinois. My mom likes to tell everybody the story about how my fresh-off-the-boat cousin couldn’t figure out how to open the car door and ended up stuck in [...]

I thought I knew rice. I don’t. Seductions of Rice, by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, bitch-slapped my arrogance with 480 pages of research and recipes. I’m Korean-American, damn it. I should have an innate knowledge of rice–rice mojo–that flows through my blood like cornbread mojo in Georgians, bagel mojo in [...]