Kimbap/Cookie Day

Today Ali and I had company for the first time! One of the other teachers, Ellen, had mentioned to me a while ago that some teachers should get together sometime and make food, and I immediately thought of making kimbap (what we in America call sushi). I suggested it to her, and she said it sounded great. A week or so later, she randomly asked me if she could host some of the All-Day Club students at my apartment so that one of the students could make cookies for them. I remembered about kimbap again, and said that we should make it a cookie/kimbap fest! So we set a date, and finally today it came! A few teachers and a few more students all showed up this afternoon, and we had a great time making kimbap, cookies, and tteokbokki (pronounced toke boke ee), which is rice cakes in hot sauce.

All the shoes (minus our own, which were put away to make more room)

Richard and Daisy cutting vegetables

Michelle (in the blue jacket) starts making the cookies

Mixing them up

All ready to put on the pan!

Cookie crew and spectators

Jin cutting the eggs for the kimbap

Michelle very meticulously placed each cookie on the tin foil

Jennifer frying up some vegemeat

Ellen (the teacher who helped organize this) making tteokbokki

Making kimbap

Ellen still working on the tteokbokki

More kimbap!

Ali helps cut it

All ready to eat! ...except for the tteokboki, which I forgot to wait for when I took the picture.

Of course, Koreans are most comfortable on the floor, and Ali fits right in (but not me)

After lunch, a couple of the students were tired, so they sacked out in the "office"

The cleanup crew

Jennifer posing after a short nap

For pictures of our first two-person Kimbap Day in February, click here.

Kimbap success!

We first ate kimbap at a vegetarian buffet that Jonathan and I went to with one of my religion students from Cheonan. I piled a generous helping of sushi on my plate at the buffet and then, when I sat down to eat, learned the truth. I actually didn't have any sushi on my plate. And that's because sushi is Japanese. And the most popular variety contains meat. My plate actually contained kimbap, which is Korean and usually vegetarian. So, I'm very sorry to inform all of you vegetarian folks out there who think you're eating sushi, but you're really not. You're eating kimbap; kim=seaweed, bap=rice.*

The first Friday after we moved to Seoul, Jonathan and I wandered around our new neighbourhood looking for a grocery store. We found one only a few streets away (affectionate nicknamed the Elephant Mart by our fellow foreign teachers because of the elephant-esque logo), and were happy to discover it had most of the food items we needed. In the kitchen products section we noticed roller mats and exclaimed that we should make kimbap. So we tossed two roller mats in our cart amongst the food. And then we went home to our apartment, put the items away, and the rollers have been sitting in a cupboard in their packaging ever since.

But this afternoon we decided today was K-day. And so we made rice, cut up veggies (carrots, cucumbers, yellow bell peppers and danmuji, pickled radish) and soy hot dogs, and broke out the roller mats. Here's what it looked like.

Measuring out the rice

Rice rinse

Our trusty rice cooker

One of the largest carrots we've ever seen!

It really is huge! We only used 1/8 of it for our kimbap today, and had leftovers

The rice steaming away

Since we don't currently have any tofu, we decided to heat up some of the delicious hot dogs that can be found at the corner SDA food store

Smallerating the hot dogs

All the necessary ingredients for a great meal

Ready to start building!

Is it just me or does this table look really low?

The key is to have an even, thin layer of rice on nearly the whole sheet

This meal had a lot of colour

Rolling

Ali building her kimbap

A surprisingly good knife that came with the apartment

All ready to devour!

Yum!!

*An interesting article comparing sushi and kimbap.