Day 189, September 21, 2020
The Box Factory
Today's soundtrack: Return to Forever: Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, Al Di Meal, Lenny White 43rd Heineken Jazzaldia, San Sebastian, Spain, 2008
We had two friends come over for a socially distanced dinner outside last night and I spent two days preparing and drawing from the flavors of my childhood. The flavors were all slightly evolved, but they stemmed from that same memory well. Again, I return to my mom's story, where she claims she came to this country not knowing how to cook Korean food, and figured it out on her own with what she had. She claims they spent a year living on bologna.
The thing about Korean food is that it is labor intensive. I can see how the temptation to cut corners, make a process quicker, would alter the food chemistry and change how all the various pieces fit together. For example, I remember how my mother used to soak mung beans overnight, and then spend a long time with the blender grinding up all the beans into a slurry that formed the dough base for bindaetteok. The blender was imperfect and I think that was one of the marvelous things of my childhood bindaetteok, it had texture. Today, there are the powdered mung beans, which make it much more convenient, like pancake batter. But the texture is too smooth, too even. There is no dynamic to the pancake part. And in the bindaetteok of my childhood there are little nuggets of ground pork, kimchee, scallions, and kongnamul sprouts. One of these days, I will spend a weekend and shoot for authenticity, build off of my memory. This weekend I made a more contemporary version with mung bean flour, shredded zucchini, kimchee, red peppers, and eggplant. It was also very tasty, but very different from my childhood.
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| Kimbap |
The other day I saw a Twinkie in the checkout aisle of the grocery store. When I was in grade school, our version of The Simpson's box factory, was the Hostess factory in Framingham. Every year, it seemed, we would get into our yellow school busses and drive out to the Hostess factory and get a tour of the facilities. I don't think anyone ever paid attention to any of the machinery because our attention was all about the reward at the end, the tour cafeteria where everyone was allowed to pick one Hostess confection to taste, fresh from the factory floor.
My parents were never ones to succumb to buying Hostess treats, and I actually didn't really care for any of them, except Twinkies. That annual pilgrimage to the Hostess factory was like visiting a kind of Mecca, the birthplace of the Twinkie, the prefect delicate cake injected in three holes on the bottom with sugar creme filling. It took more self control than I possessed to not immediately wolf a Twinkie down in more than three or four bites, pausing only to savor the rush of sugar enhanced pleasure. I would look forward to the moment for most of a year. Very occasionally, I'd visit some friend's house where there was actually a box of Twinkies in the kitchen pantry. That seemed inconceivable to me, first that someone's parents let them buy a box of Twinkies, and then that there were still enough left to share with visiting friends.
In any case, I have a strong suspicion that the Twinkie of today does not compare with the Twinkie of my childhood. I'm fairly certain thirty to forty of the ingredients are now banned for human consumption. I jest, of course. And perhaps sometime soon, for the purpose of research, I will buy a Twinkie and eat it out in the parking lot of the grocery store, to see if it compares.
The other big thing I made this weekend was kimbap, a seaweed roll filled with rice, crab meat, spinach, carrots, tofu, egg, and a yellow pickled radish. Half of the ingredients are themselves cooked and prepared separately. It makes one truly appreciate all the effort that went into so many of the elaborate meals of my childhood. I would eat tremendous servings at family gatherings giving little thought to how long my mother, and the other wives, and occasionally husbands, worked to produce the amazing food before us.
I was talking about kimbap with my mother and she disparaged the kimbap at one restaurant we went to, and I nodded, but I realized that I'm not sure I know what differentiates good kimbap from mediocre kimbap. I theorize it must have something to do with the ingredients, the filling. That, for a typical restaurant, there is no way to consistently prepare all the ingredients with the detail that one might at home. In a restaurant there are far too many other things to also prepare and serve, and kimbap is often seen as an appetizer, a precursor to the real meal. Therefore, one doesn't need to think too long on it and the rice may or may not be seasoned. There may be simple strips of ham. The carrots may not be flavored or sautéed, and so on. Some restaurants may substitute ground beef for the ham, but it is rare to find actual bulgogi tucked inside kimbap like my mom used to make.
When I visited Korea a few years ago, we stopped in a restaurant that specialized in all different kinds of kimbap. That seems to be a thing in Korea, that there are these restaurants that specialize in mainly one thing. Bowls of cold noodle soup and variations on that. And Kimbap in all different varieties. I was very excited. The proprietor's workstation was like the sandwich making station at Subway, only all the bins were filled with different fillings that she mixed and matched with a gentle efficiency. We got ours to-go, and ate them outside on the grounds of a museum we were visiting.
One of my challenges with discerning the degrees of separation between kimbap, is because I usually go so long between kimbap eating that my craving and desire for the thing overwhelms everything else. I build it up in my head, I conjure up those childhood memories of spending the day at the beach while my father fished off the piers. And when it was lunch time, coming back from playing with driftwood, seaweed, and fish skeletons, my mom would pull tinfoil wrapped rolls of kimbap from the red metal Coleman cooler. The taste of those slightly sandy kimbap are embodied for me in a perfect summer day. I don't think anything can really compare with that.
So, it is no surprise, that even the kimbap restaurant's kimbap seems somewhat unnoteworthy in my memory, except, there was the taste of perilla leaves. Koreans will often call them sesame leaves, a misnomer. I'm not sure why they are called sesame leaves, but they have a very distinct aromatic flavor. It wasn't even a taste I was particularly fond of, but now, just a hint of it seems to propel me through time to when there are kids running around the yard yelling. I am one of those kids running around as the adults prepared the charcoal grill, And somewhere in the ensuing meal, I would somewhere taste perilla. It was almost a disappointment, like getting a bay leaf in your spaghetti. But imagine my surprise in finding that taste in Korea in the manicured lawns outside a paper factory and textiles museum.
I didn't add perilla to my kimbap this weekend, though we did have fried perilla leaves and buds. I'll save that for next summer when I can experiment with the flavor a little.
Well, enough of the tongue memories for tonight.
Take care and be well,
Leo
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| Making kimbap. |
From Our Friends:
From the Jandon Center:
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From EducationAdminWebAdvisor:
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From the Cultural Research Network:
September 25: “Events” in the Post-“Information” Age
A/Professor Julia Sonnevend and Dr. Bernard Geoghegan
Will the word information acquire new meanings under the pressure of technological transformations caused by the Covid-19 digital lockdown? How will people understand, define and experience major or minor events when they are limited to virtual encounters, online meetings and social media catch-ups? The webinar will interrogate old meanings and explore emerging connotations of what becomes information and whither the nature of an event in the seamless enfolding of the two in the online world.
Register here:
September 25, 2020
New York (Eastern Daylight Time): 8:00 AM
From the Community College Humanities Review:
 Call for Content for the CCHR |
The next edition of the Community College Humanities Review is being compiled, and, as always, we are calling on you, our members, to consider submitting your own work for publication. The full submission guidelines can be found on this page, but please do note that the CCHRconsiders writing, research, creative nonfiction, fiction, interviews, poetry, and photography for publication. For more info, contact the Editor, Sydney Elliott. |
Mellon/ACLS Fellowships |
The American Council of Learned Societies is continuing to offer the Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowships, and this program is absolutely perfect for our members, so we strongly encourage you to apply. More information can be found at the link below. DEADLINE: September 30, 2020 |
From Gateway Cities Innovation Institute:
From Joshua Gaestel:
The Festival is happening this week, the 24th, 25th, and 26th! Meek Lover Creek will be available for streaming in Block 14 of the festival starting on the 24th! Follow this link to go straight to Block 14, where you can get access to 5 awesome short films for 72 hours.
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/
Or get an All Access Pass for better value, and enjoy heaps of amazing local art this week! But don't forget to check out your friends and neighbors in Meek Lover Creek (block 14)!
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/
From the American Association of Geographers (AAG):
From the Community Economies Resource Network:
I want to share with you our latest publication- ‘Cooking Up Politics’: A Feminist Guide on the Right to Food and Nutrition for Women in Rural Areas. This Guide has been developed by female human rights practitioners, activists and rural workers. It provides women in rural areas - whether or not they belong to local or national organizations - with practical guidance on how to build a right to food and nutrition agenda based on recent international human rights law standards. You can accessthe Guide ‘Cooking Up Politics’ and capacity building supporting materials by clicking on this hyperlink. These supporting materials consist of: power point presentations, a poster, postcards/reference cards with a summary of each step in the Guide, a notebook and name tags. Available in English, Spanish and French.
Please share with your contacts and on social networks using: #CookUpPolitcs
From the AAC&U:
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| Fried Perilla Leaves and Buds |
Today's Online Teaching Tips:
From NISOD:
From Academic Impressions:
Taking the Lab Class Virtual To offer more than pre-recorded lab demonstrations or virtual laboratories to remote students, two chemistry instructors at Missouri S&T have refined their approach, which uses real-time live-streamed demonstrations of experiments. To keep students engaged, the synchronous sessions include small-group breakout sessions and on-the-spot activities like having students name compounds; balance chemical equations; predict the outcomes of experiments; and calculate masses, amounts and concentrations for the chemicals used. Read more. Related:
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