A whole new world

After the orientation last week, my new buddy Gary wanted to go to the foreign quarter. He wanted to pick up some ingredients to make some Jerked chicken. In Korea you can pretty much only get salt, pepper, garlic, onions, red chilly pepper, and a dozen types of soy sauce and rice vinegars.

Thats the funny thing about living in Korea, they dont use a hell of a lot of other spices. I had to go to about nine stores before I even found baking yeast, and I still have not seen a single bottle of vanilla extract or leaf of basil since I moved here. Things that are so common, they are available at every single store in the US are completely absent here on the peninsula.

I had not even realized it, but we have pretty much been eating stir frys and rice at every meal for the last two months. Not anymore, I am tired of using onions, garlic, red chillies, and salt at every meal. I decided to break out of the mold last week. My first step was acquiring cilantro. That was located in the foreign quarter, fresh cilantro at that, they also had dried cumin one of the basic spices for Mexican and Indian food. Then I found some garbanzo (chick peas) beans in the same store. That coupled with lemons would recreate our meal plans.

Now I had the ingredients for a food revolution. I first had to soak the chick peas overnight, but that did not stop me from making salsa! We had salsa, beans, and rice with a tofu-potato scramble that would knock your socks off! It was devoured in mere seconds.

Last night the chick peas were ready, I soaked some sesame seeds in water, then ground them up (tahinie), I cooked the garbanzo beans in the rice/pressure cooker. After adding garlic, olive oil, and salt I ground them all up to a creamy consistency, and boom! we had the delicious diarrhea like substance known as hummus. Beautiful hummus, once a staple in our lives, its as common in the northwest as rain in winter but it is all but absent in this strange foreign land.

Then I took some flour, water and baking powder, and created the simple flatbread known as tortillas. My wife asked me where I bought them! LOL! ROFL! LMAO! No, like god himself I created the tortillas in my own image, pasty and white.

So to recap, salsa, hummus, tortillas add those with a nice tofu potato scramble(yes again) and some salad and we had...well not really burritos, but more like a nice soft shelled taco thingy! And it was good!

My youngest normally eats like a bird, she will have a little salad and some rice, and maybe a little tofu but not much else. She kept asking me "Daddy can we have more than one?" Of course I told her yes, and she proceeded to eat like 4 burrito-taco thingies. I had to make a second batch of tortillas and more salsa.

My family devoured that stuff like a swarm of locusts. And I saw that it was good, then I rested.

I was so happy to make something not using chilly pepper, garlic, onions and vinegar for dinner, but then I realized that I actually used all those things in the salsa and hummus...