I have to admit that when things were hectic in June I slacked off on feeding E. solid food regularly. But last week I decided to get serious about feeding him solids and finally got around to buying E. a high chair. I really like the design of the chair we bought. It’s like a little barber chair: it has a center pole with a pneumatic lift so it’s height-adjustable which means that E. can use it to sit at our kitchen bar when he’s older. And the base has casters so it can be wheeled around, which has been more useful than I thought it would be. I can wheel E. over to the sink after his meal to wipe him down or if I’m working in the kitchen I can position him next to me to hang out.
Anyway, E. seems to like sitting in his chair so far. During this past week E. has gotten a lot better at eating Cheerios and enjoys chasing them around his tray.
I’ve been feeding E. rice cereal once a day since Sunday and yesterday I could tell that the light went on in his head. He started opening his mouth and leaning forward as soon as he was finished swallowing the last bite. N. said he looked like a baby bird. It was pretty cute. A couple of times he even grabbed my arm to guide the spoon I was holding into his mouth.
In other news, it looks like Robin Watch ’08 has ended sadly. Last week there was a horrible windstorm and the willow tree was shaken like crazy. Afterwards I didn’t see the female robin sitting on the nest for days. I went outside and checked and two eggs had fallen out of the nest and smashed on the ground. I took a peek inside the nest and there was one egg left, but since the robin hadn’t been sitting on it for days there wasn’t any way it would hatch.
I read online that robins lay about 3 clutches of eggs a season, so the pair probably decided to cut their loses after losing the eggs in the storm and decided to build a new nest somewhere else and try again.
Yesterday E. had his first real experience with solid food. (I’m not counting the handful of times in the last month that N. has snuck E. tastes of random things such as ranch dressing and frozen yogurt.)
His first solid meal was rice cereal; it seemed to go well. He was really good about opening his mouth and actually seemed to swallow most of the cereal, contrary to the photographic evidence.
I’m going to give him rice cereal once a day for a week or so and if everything continues to go well, it will be on to tastier things. Kimchi, here we come!
N. and I got takeout from a local fresh-mex place, Cafe Rio, over the weekend. There are a couple of different fresh mex chains in Utah, but it seems like Cafe Rio has the most efficient take-out service (which has become more important to me since E.’s birth). When you place your order, they give you an exact time when your food will be ready and also ask for your first name and last initial. When I went to go pick up our orders of shrimp tacos and mahimahi tacos on Saturday (mahimahi tacos=good, shrimp tacos=not so much), they had a little bit of trouble finding my order.
Because it was under “Saith U!” As I’ve noted before, people mishear my name over the phone quite often. A surprising number of people seem to think that Saith is a more probable name than Faith. Saith is not a name! And my last initial does not remotely sound like “U.” I guess I really should switch to using my middle name for phone orders. I tried it out a week ago and it worked well. But I felt a little weird doing; like I was being sneaky and trying to get away with something. (My hypersensitive conscience strikes again!) But it’s probably worth it to avoid the confusion.
So watch out for secret agent Saith, going under cover at a take-out restaurant near you!
Things have been pretty quiet so far this week. I’m almost over a bad cold I’ve had since last week but N. is just coming down with it now. E. seems to have escaped it so far and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that he’ll be able to go a couple of weeks without suffering from some ailment.
Here’s a Youtube video that N. showed me. It’s pretty amazing. It’s a stop motion film depicting wars and conflicts from WWII to the present, using the foods of the countries involved. (Watch for the North Korean kimchi versus South Korean kimchi around 1:45.) There’s a guide to the foods and the countries they represent here. Apparently the film was written, directed, and animated in 3 months by just one guy, Stefan Nadelman. And all of the food used was eaten by Stefan or his dog so none went to waste!
On another note, I have woodworking class tonight. Hopefully I’ll be able to make some good progress because there are only a couple weeks of class left. Yikes!
Last week I made bibimbap for the first time. My Korean cooking skills are almost nonexistent but my expert sister Jan walked me through it over the phone. Among other things, I made bulgogi to go on top of the bibimbap. (Yeah, I was cooking for 2+ hours.)
This is the bulgogi recipe that my sister uses. It has a few more ingredients that other recipes I’ve seen, but it’s really delicious. (I made a huge batch so I would have extra to freeze. You might want to halve this unless you’re feeding 10+ people)
Ingredients
4 lbs. beef chuck roast, sliced thinly (I get the butcher to slice it about 1/8″ thin.)
1 yellow onion, roughly chopped
3 Tablespoons of Garlic, crushed
1 kiwi, peeled
1/2″ piece of ginger, peeled and then sliced (slicing prevents it from being stringy when blended)
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 ripe Asian pear, peeled and cored
1 cup Korean soy sauce
1 cup water
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup thinly sliced green onions, green parts only
sprinkle of roasted sesame seeds
Directions
Add all ingredients except for green onions and sesame seeds to blender or food processor and process until well blended.
Put sliced beef into a couple of gallon Ziploc bags, add marinade, and mix to coat. Refrigerate for approximately 1 hour (According to Jan, if you marinate the meat for too long, the acid in the marinade can “make the meat mushy.”)
Cook beef (in batches if necessary) in large skillet over high heat. Add green onions towards the end.
Garnish with sesame seeds and serve with rice (and lettuce if desired).
When I made the bulgogi, I was struck by how easily and quickly it came togther. It only took about 30 minutes to peel/rough chop everything and throw it into the food processor for the marinade. And cooking the meat went very quickly as well because it was sliced so thinly. I’m going to try and make it for dinner more often.
Whew–today was crazy. I had to turn in my big monthly report for work and the baby kept waking up early from his naps. I just got my report finished, though. Yay!
Today I was thinking about some of the foods I ate as a kid. My mom is Korean and is a great cook of both Korean and American food, but some of the quick meals we would eat growing up could be kindly described as “fusion cuisine.” Some were her idea, some were the ideas of my older siblings, and I think some were entirely my invention. Most of them included either kimchi or the West’s greatest gift to Asia: SPAM! (I just checked with N. to see how SPAM was capitalized and he recommended all caps because “SPAM is too big of a food for little letters.”)
Anyway, here are some of the weird foods I remember from my childhood:
Cream of Wheat with kimchi: My mom would make Cream of Wheat for breakfast in the wintertime and we would eat it with radish kimchi. It wasn’t until I went to college that I realized that most people who eat Cream of Wheat sweeten it like oatmeal–my mom only put a little bit of salt in it. I think this dish still holds up because the Cream of Wheat was essentially a stand-in for rice and it was a nice savory alternative to oatmeal.
Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup with rice mixed in and kimchi and pan-fried SPAM on the side: Another hot breakfast for wintertime. The SPAM went well with the soup and rice, and the spicy kimchi would cut through the saltiness of the soup and spam.
Rice with SPAM, kimchi, and gim (dried seaweed): This still ranks pretty high on my list of great home-cooked lunches. It’s pretty much perfect. If I cook it N. will eat it too, but only after he complains about the smell of the fried SPAM.
Plain Dduk (pressed rice cake) with Pace Picante Sauce: when I was in elementary school, I would make this snack for myself after school. I think one of my older siblings probably taught me how, but I can’t remember. I would put the dduk in a plastic bag and add a couple tablespoons of water, twist the bag shut, put it on a plate, and microwave it for a minute or so. This would kind of steam the dduk and soften it up and it would be all warm and kind of gooey. Then I would dip it into the salsa and eat it. Yeah, pretty weird, I know. Did we not have tortilla chips in the house? But to this day, when I smell Pace Picante Sauce, my mouth starts watering and I can almost taste it the dduck.
These other two have nothing to do with Korean food and are just weird.
Bagels with margarine and garlic powder: I would warm up onion Lender’s bagels, spread margarine on them, and then sprinkle garlic powder on the top. Obviously I was not too concerned with bad breath as a kid.
Microwaved marshmallows: I would put two or three jumbo marshmallows on a plate and microware them for a minute or so, watching them inflate and puff up. Then I would swirl them around with a fork until they were kind of the consistency of taffy and eat them. I had to be sure to rinse off the plate well afterwards or else the marshmallow dried hard as a rock and was a pain to wash.
Well, I’m sure there are more, but I think those are the standouts. The reason this topic came up today was that my lunch today was one of the dishes I listed–l’ll leave exactly which one it was to your imagination.
I ate some weird things as a kid, but at least I ate them in the normal way. Not like the family in this SNL sketch that N. sent me a link to today.
How about you? Did you eat any weird foods as a kid?
My mom was in town over the weekend to visit my sister, Jan. When you put Jan and my mom together, there’s bound to be a lot of Korean cooking going on–both of them are experts at it. And after many long years of practice, I am an expert at eating their cooking! I’m lucky that Jan lives only 20 minutes away from my house. Because I have more free time during the day now, I’m planning on hanging out with her more and hopefully learning how to make a few dishes.
While she was here, my mom made makguksu (not sure on the romanization), one of my favorite Korean comfort food dishes. Made with an anchovy broth, these noodles are topped with egg, dried seaweed, Korean fish hot-dog, and cucumber. You can put lots of different things on top. The sauce is made up of soy sauce, ground sesame, green onions, crushed red pepper, garlic, and a few other things that escape me at the moment. It was delicious! It also took a lot longer to put together than I remember it taking as a kid. I asked my mom if it was taking an especially long time to make for some reason but she assured me quitethoroughly that it always took this long to make and just I didn’t realize it because as a kid I only showed up at the very end. Oops.
My mom and Jan also made up a big batch of kkakdugikimchi, made from diced daikon radish. It’s SO good. They knew it’s my favorite kimchi, and so…
…they saved this gigantic jar for me! Wow. I don’t know if even N. and I can finish this before it goes bad. It’s a race against time!
E. turned 100 days old this last week. Via Wikipedia, “In Korea it’s common to celebrate the bek-il or the 100th day of life. This tradition was born from a time of high infant mortality when many babies would die before three months of age. As a result the 100th day is a celebration of life as the baby has survived the difficult first 100 days of life.”
E. is a quarter Korean and while we weren’t going to have a traditional ceremony I wanted to go out for Korean food last week to celebrate his bek-il. However, a blizzard blew in last week and we weren’t able to make it out. N. had the day off today and so for lunch we went out for Korean food.
We drove down to a little place in Provo called Sam Hawk. Because their kitchen is so tiny, N. and I usually call in our order ahead of time. Otherwise, the wait can be up to an hour and a half, especially if you get stuck behind a large group. The first time we ate there, it literally took us two hours to get our food. The waitress felt badly for us and brought us rice crackers to snack on and Korean fashion magazines to flip through while we waited. It was funny at the time, but not that funny since we were crazy hungry. And the rice crackers sadly didn’t cut it.
So yeah, we learned our lesson: calling ahead definitely pays off. When we were there today we received our food, ate, and paid the check before some families who had been there when we arrived even got their food. We definitely got a few dirty looks as we were leaving. I felt a little smug for being in the know, but also a tiny bit guilty. But the food was really good.
We started with some dukboki, one of my favorites. It’s sort of like street food and so not every Korean restaurant serves it. I loved eating it at the street carts in when I was in Korea. It cracked me up how the vendors would wrap the plate in a clean plastic bag, put the dukboki on the plate, and then peel off the plastic bag and throw it away when you finished. This is one of the few Korean dishes I can make at home.
The banchan included seasoned black beans, potatoes, kimchi, and mung bean spouts.
N. and I both had dolsot bibimbap. E. started fussing while we were eating so I ended up holding him on my lap, but I had to be careful to keep him away from the bowl so he wouldn’t be burned.
The food was super good. After lunch we ran some errands and then got some frozen custard before coming home (lemon chiffon–yum!) So all and all, it was a lovely Presidents’ Day.
Yesterday I noticed the E. didn’t seem like his normal cheerful self and in the early evening he started to feel pretty warm. I took his temperature and it was 101 and some degrees, and so N. and I took made an appointment with our pediatrician’s after hours clinc. There his temperature was a little over 102, and because he’s so little still they wanted to run some urine and possibly blood tests to find out why.
Here’s the part I’m really ashamed of: when they were going to insert the catheter, they wanted me to sit by him and hold his arms and try and keep him calm. And I just lost it and started crying. I just felt so bad that E. was feeling so awful. He had been whimpering almost constantly for a couple of hours and it was obvious that he was miserable. And the whole catheter thing was freaking me out. E.’s so little! So N. held him. It was pretty bad because E. had just wet his diaper and so they had to stick the catheter way up there to get any pee at all. Of course E. totally freaked out. I still feel bad that I wimped out. I should have been there for him.
After they looked at his urine, they wanted to look at his blood so they sent us over to the hospital to get it drawn. It was now after 9pm and the outpatient lab was closed, so we had to wait in the emergency room for someone to draw it there. We were there for almost an hour before someone could be spared to do it. This time I did better though. I was collected enough to hold him down as they put the little tourniquet on his tiny arm and drew the blood. Argh! The whole thing was so sad.
So after that and around 10pm we were back over the clinic. They close at 10 but were waiting to get E.’s blood results and for us. It turned out that the type of red blood cells that the body releases from bone marrow when it’s fighting an infection were elevated. After talking with the doctor it was decided to give E. a one-time shot of antibiotics. So I had to hold him down again for that. Good times!
We got home a little after 10:30pm. I massaged E.’s thigh where he got his shot (he screamed bloody murder, of course) and gave him some baby Tylenol like the doctor said to and put him to bed. He fussed for a little while and then feel asleep, exhausted. He woke up screaming around 4am this morning and I jumped out of bed in a panic and ran across the hallway to his room, running smack into the door in the process. (I’m so unused to him screaming that it really kind of freaks me out.) But he’s now sleeping in his swing.
*sigh* I am so wiped out! We have a follow up appointment for E. this afternoon. Hopefully we’ll find out that the antibiotic has helped.
Anyway, here are some of E. with his cousins Big E. and Little E. who were visiting this weekend. It was really fun to see them and N.’s sister G. and her husband.
G., who is pregnant, had a craving for chajangmyun (Korean black bean paste noodles) and radish kimchi. Both sounded good to me and so we made some noodles and got out the kimchi. As G. and I were eating, Little E. declared that she wanted some noodles. So G. gave her a taste. And Little E. declared that she wanted more noodles! She ended up eating almost a third of the bowl. I think G. was torn was between annoyance at having to share so many of her noodles and pride that her daughter was eating Korean food; the pride definitely won out. Little E. also wanted to try the kimchi, but that didn’t go over as well!
I have to admit that when things were hectic in June I slacked off on feeding E. solid food regularly. But last week I decided to get serious about feeding him solids and finally got around to buying E. a high chair. I really like the design of the chair we bought. It’s like a little barber chair: it has a center pole with a pneumatic lift so it’s height-adjustable which means that E. can use it to sit at our kitchen bar when he’s older. And the base has casters so it can be wheeled around, which has been more useful than I thought it would be. I can wheel E. over to the sink after his meal to wipe him down or if I’m working in the kitchen I can position him next to me to hang out.
Because it was under “Saith U!” As 
My mom and Jan also made up a big batch of 
…they saved this gigantic jar for me! Wow. I don’t know if even N. and I can finish this before it goes bad. It’s a race against time!
