Kumqwhat?

Kumquat.

Kumquats have the kind of kick I need to wake me up in the morning. Well, that and a cup of coffee so strong it can benchpress 180 (is that a lot? I have no idea.) With that in mind I decided to make kumquat marmalade.

The recipe is sosupersimple. Cut up the kumquats in halves or quarters and coax out all those little seeds. Then it's just a 3-1-1 ratio: for every 3 cups of kumquat add 1 cup of water and 1 cup of sugar. No gelatin necessary! I used part raw sugar and part white, because that's what I had, but I'm sure either/or would be fine.

Throw it all on a pot with a splash or two of orange juice and then let it boil away over medium-low heat until it's reduced, stirring during commercial breaks or whenever you think of it. It should be thick enough that it'll sit on a piece of bread without spilling off onto your work clothes.

Other than toast I think you could add it to a vinaigrette for salad or even incorporate it into a sauce for pork and it should last a while too, I've had mine in the fridge for a couple of weeks now with no signs of spoilage.

In other news, I bought like a pound of mussels for $3.50! I don't actually know if it was a pound but it was waaay too much for two of us to eat and then I had the rest for dinner the next night. So many mussel recipes to come...

Crafturbate

I'm not a particularly crafty person but I've been in need of a jewelry storage system for about the last three years. A ziplock freezer baggie does not a jewelry box make. I couldn't find anything I liked so I decided to make the damn thing myself. I only managed to take two pretty terrible photos before my camera battery died, but trust me it looks better in person.

First, find a stick. It should be a good stick, with many small branches to serve as hangers for your jewels. Personally I spent upwards of one minute rummaging through the brush pile outside my house. Side note: pruning the trees makes them look nice, but leaving it all in a slowly decaying pile underneath said tree does not.

Next, locate empty water bottle. Check the recycling bag you forgot to take out. Now cut off the bottom to form the base and poke a small hole in the lid. Insert branch into lid. Pat self on back.

Finally, spray paint. I recommend a well ventilated area, such as a closet with the doors shut. If you find your self getting woozy and giggle, just open that window you've been staring at.



I think after another coat of paint it'll look less like a stick in a bottle and more like..whatever it's supposed to be. Maybe not, but it's still better than a ziplock.

Krazy Korea Komes Early

Yes I know that 'komes' looks like it should be pronounced 'combs' even though it's supposed to sound like 'comes' but I'm on this whole crazy with a k shtick and really you should just be happy for me that Korea hasn't sucked that last bit of creativity out of me, however terrible it is.

And yes, once upon a time I said I'd keep the Krazy Korean things down to a once a week well guess what I lied. Korea is too Krazy to be restrained like that. Plus, I need to vent, a lot, because my shitometer is off the charts and I simply don't have the prescription meds to bring it back down.

So.

My co-teacher announced yesterday that she's getting married...in June. Koreans don't get 'engaged' I'm told, they just decide to get married, which is what she did this past weekend. My other co-teacher told me that she has been dating this lucky fellow for one whole month. Holdthephone, I haven't even finished a menstrual cycle and she's engaged??? Let me squeeze out an egg out first whydontcha. Well actually she met him in December, decided she didn't like him, but he kept hounding her until she gave in and started dating him a month ago. For those keeping track, that's dating one month, 'engaged' the next month and married the month after that - three months, start to finish, bing-o bang-o bong-o (you can't stop Luongo - cbc3anyone?). I've said it before and I'll say it again - if I've had food in my fridge for longer than your relationship you should not get married. I'm not talking the jar of pickles at the back either, if milk hasn't passed it's expiration date you shouldn't set a wedding date. As co-teacher #2 said though, she is 32...

Next.

Every English teacher in Korea has an 'open class' coming up where representatives from the school board (DMOE) and some of our peers will come and watch us teach to make sure we're not incompetent buffoons. Fair enough, how hard can it be? Well actually, the question should be how hard can we make it? Answer: ve-herry. First *we* sat down to make up the lesson plan which consisted of my co-teacher asking for my ideas and then talking over me when I responded, which is actually far more input than I've previously had. I was a little concerned though, because not only was she completely overhauling our regular routine (push play on government appointed cd-rom), but her ideas sounded highly elaborate for kids who've just mastered Don't Pee in Your Pants, so I ask her how *we're* going to manage this. "Oh, don't worry, we'll tell them the instructions before." Of course we will. What I thought would be a fringe festival indie concert has just been upgraded to LIVE AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL!!!

Then today came the rehearsal with the poor class that's being subjected to this torture and we spent the entire period devising a new seating arrangement that might please DMOE. *We* tried out two desk patterns(while students sat quietly with their eyes closed and their hands on their head) before deciding that yes, 5 groups of 6 students was better than 7 groups of 4 students. Next we have to determine student seat assignments because DMOE prefers the stupid kids to be closer to the front, because everyone knows proximity is half the education battle. First there was talk of a placement test to determine the order but in the end we settled on self evaluation. ATTENTION TEN YEAR OLDS: please take a good hard look at yourselves, accurately gauge your self worth and group yourselves accordingly. Be honest: did you struggle with 'wah do warry warry' last week? Now watch as we single out the dummies and shove them to the front. Don't be embarrassed, it's what DMOE wants. At the end of the ordeal one boy (at the front) said to me, "Teacha, teacha, no study today?" No dear, that's not what DMOE wants. Naturally after creating this desk arrangement we can't use the classroom so I have to go around to homerooms for the other classes...open class isn't until next Friday.

This is already too long but allow me to just describe my shitacular upcoming schedule: off Saturday and Sunday, work Monday except they've cancelled all my classes for no reason so I'll sit around all day with my finger up my butt and then off Tuesday and Wednesday. Congratulations administration, just a stellar job all around.

KK in the Classroom

Koreans love to chant. A chant is halfway between regular speech and a song. A chant is to a song what an acrostic is to a poem. What a greeting card is to prose. What nails on a chalk board is to my ears. These are the lyrics to one such chant:

Wah do warry warry wah wah wah
Wah do warry warry wah wah wah
Where is my bat? It's in the box.
Where is my bat? It's in the box.
Oh thanks Mom.

For the record, 'wah do warry' doesn't mean anything in English or Korean, which is great if the lesson was on gutteral noises but it wasn't. My co-teacher then had the students re-write the lyrics to spice things up a bit. By and large it was pretty standard: where is my pencil? It's on my desk. Where is my desk? It's in the classroom....there is very little by way of creativity here. Then I went up to one group of boys and asked them to read me their lyrics. "Oh no teacher, too dirty!" Okay, now I really want to hear it. This is what they came up with:

"Where is my poo? It's in the father's mouth."

Awesome.

I was also tasked with another film this week. The subject was 'When's Your Birthday?' and the general plot of my script was kid A asks kid B when their birthday is, kid B says it's today, kid A obviously forgot, oopsies, gives a makeshift gift, everyone laughs. Right? Nooooo. The kids are reading it flatter than their pre-puberty chests. So I ask my teacher, "Do they understand that it's a joke, or is it not funny to forget someone's birthday in Korea?" To which she replies, "Oh, a joke. Like, they're only pretending to forget the birthday?" Sigh. After much coaching, this is the result:

Bake Bread Break Bread

I love fresh from the oven bread. I love the smell as its baking, I love the steam as you break it open, I love the puddle of melted butter on a freshly cut slice. My lack of oven clearly puts a damper on this little lovefest though. Korea has fine bread, don't get me wrong. It's fine. It's prefunctory, but fine. White, sliced, holds jam when toasted, these are rudimentary qualities of bread. Which is fine, but I want more.

Enter rice cooker. Blessed rice cooker. I can't emphasize enough how happy I was with my rice cooker bread. Hand on heart, I think it's the best bread I've ever made.

I bought a bread-mix from the grocery store (think cake mix but bread) because I couldn't find yeast sold otherwise. I mixed it all up, guessing at the liquid amounts because I couldn't read the directions, and let it rise. Normally I would turn the oven on low for a couple of minutes and then let the dough rise in the warm oven but, alas, not possible. Solution: microwave. I noticed that the microwave was pretty warm after I took something out so I threw the dough in there. Genius.

I punched the dough down once after it doubled in size and let it rise again then transfered carefully to my lightly greased rice cooker. I did about one and a half 'hot' settings, but I wasn't paying really careful attention so I'm not sure how long it sat on 'warm' in between. I also flipped it over becuase the bottom was browning and the top wasn't. In the end this meant two crusts and was kind of an oblong shape which might not look as pretty but it's not a beauty pagent.

I made the bread to go with my mystery squash soup. It looked like a mini-green pumpkin, with orange flesh that was a little dryer than a sweet potatoe but not stringy like pumpkin. It can be roasted in the microwave in not too much time and tasted great as a curried squash soup. Any ideas what it might be?

I don't normally pay attention to the news, largely due to my propensity to become overwhelmed by the incredible amount of shit going on in the world and my inability to see any light at the end of the horrid tunnel that humanity seems to be hurtling down at breakneck speed without their seatbelts on. I'm a sensitive beast, I can't handle it.

On occasion though, something strikes me as so preposterous, so outrageous, that it I just can't help myself. Or I'm bored at work. In any case, allow me to wax incoherent on the Goldman Sachs fraud charges. There are many great analogies for this story, illustrated here by the Daily Show, but allow me to offer one more.

The Producers: a musical by Goldman Sachs

Starring Goldman Sachs as Max Bialistock
Paulson and Co. Inc. Hedge Fund as Leo Bloom
Little Old Ladies as pension funds and German banks. aka...Little Old Ladies


Down and out broadway producer Max Bialistock (Goldman and Sachs) and accountant Leo Bloom (Paulson and Co) realize that they can make money off of a shitty play (mortgages). First, they find the worst play (mortages) ever written and get little old ladies (pension funds and German banks) to invest in the show (mortages), knowing it will flop and when it does they can scamper off into the night with the money (money).

Now in the musical version the unwitting audience mistakes the show for satire and the show is a hit. This is where things differ though; there is very little room for satire in investments and the mortgages really did fail, as planned. However, after a backstage gunshot the police (Securities and Exchange Commission) arrive and haul Max and the accounting books off to jail (charge with fraud).

The finale of the real-life saga has yet to be written but if things stay on course we can expect to see Goldman and Sachs doing upwards of five years in Sing Sing before being pardoned by the Governor and walking off into the sunset, just like Max and Leo.

They say the truth is stranger than fiction. In this case though, the truth is almost exactly as strange as broadway.

The Price of Rice

When my father thought I didn't know what I was talking about he used to say 'what do you know about the price of rice in China?' Well in Korea it's cheap, but not crispy. Apart from your regular steamed rice and dishes made with steamed rice like sushi they've also got rice wine, rice dumplings, rice tea, rice vinegar, glutenous rice cakes, and rice liqour. I'm sure I'm missing at least another dozen things. You might think in such a place Rice Krispies (or Korean equivalent) would be a no brainer. You'd be wrong. The closest I found was puffed rice, which more closely resembles puffed wheat, particularly in that I can eat an entire bag for breakfast and still be hungy. I decided to use them instead to make faux rice krispy squares for my teachers. After they tried them I was told that Koreans would like them very much because they contain rice. Yeah, not the caramel or the chocolate but the rice. Always the rice.

Puffed Rice Squares

- puffed rice (or wheat)3 or 4 cups
- butter 1/2 cup
- sugar 1/2 cup
- corn syrup 1 or 2 tbsps
- chocolate

Melt butter, sugar and corn syrup in a pot. Simmer gently for several minutes, remove from heat and let cool for just a second then pour over puffed rice, stirring to combine. Press into a pan lined with parchment without burning your little fingers. Pour melted chocolate over the top and let cool in fridge several hours.