Catie: Pumpkin pie and chicken stock.

[caption id="attachment_358" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="pumpkin pie in the crousty."][/caption]

Here's our pie!

Between baking and then rapidly consuming the pie, I forgot to take any pictures of it out of the oven and actually baked, but there it is IN the oven.

It turned out surprisingly delicious.

I've made a lot of pies before, but never pumpkin (I avoid it when... well, when I'm not out of the country and desperate for ANY pie at all), so that was new in itself.  It was easy, though.

I tried a, "Baking Powder Miracle Pie Dough" against my better judgement.  It had the word, "miracle" in it!  I had to see if it was really miraculous.

Turns out... not so much.

The pie crust I would make at home has half lard, half butter and is delicious and tender and nice.

The "miracle" crust was.. hard.

Not to mention gross and weird.

And so, in future, I will stick with MY recipe.  Not miraculous ones.

I also found out the Crousty doesn't cook evenly at all.  This is fine.  I mean, already I'm asking too much of our poor Crousty toaster oven.  I think I can manage to turn things halfway through.  It's just good to know.  And the pie was still good, just a little brown on one side.

Yay!  Thank you, my mom, for the spices!

Tomorrow (Tuesday) and Wednesday, I'm shadowing Aaron at school to figure out how to do things when he leaves for the US (I don't envy that plane ride -- ugh).  I was supposed to go today, but the school has just developed a "CNN" debate class that starts this term.

And, yes, apparently it is patterned after The CNN.  Although, I guess they got weirded out when Aaron tried introducing debate to the debate class.

"Why do you not teach them from the book?" or something along those lines was said.

But why would you have a debate class and no debate?

Welcome to Korea!

Anyway, Aaron doesn't teach the CNN class on Mondays, so I'm waiting to go until Wednesday, when I'll get to see how the CNN class runs.

Since we'll both be gone and out of the house for two days, I am cooking lots of food today.  Which is really relative, because, in Korea, you can't cook lots of food at once.  There are only small pots, small pans, and small ovens.

In light of this, I'm making two dinners.  A chicken pot pie (if all goes well) and chicken taco soup.  Together, I think these will hold us over for lunches and dinners for two days.

The chicken taco soup calls for (of course) chicken broth.  And I've seen Swanson chicken broth at the gourmet market in Dunsan-dong, but that is far away and I didn't feel like hopping a bus and braving the TimeWorld Galleria crowds today.  We did it Saturday and again on Sunday (all three of our Starbucks are located within a block of TimeWorld Galleria), so I'm not feeling up to it again.  I even tried to bribe myself with this delicious wrap they have there -- it's this tortilla filled with chicken, a red cabbage/green cabbage coleslaw type mix, onions, tomato, yogurt sauce, sweet, spicy red sauce and mustard and it is A-MAZING, if spicy -- but to no avail as that would only have made the trip more expensive and, therefore, less appealing.

So, I'm making my own chicken stock.

SCARY.

I've never made chicken stock.  Plus, I thought I'd found celery at the store, but it turns out I didn't, it was just MORE of the giant green onions.  They look so much alike.

What I wanna know is: HOW MANY ONIONS DOES ONE COUNTRY NEED?

Apparently, a lot.

So, it's celery-less.  Hopefully that's fine.  It'll have to be fine.

Turns out chicken stock is easy, so I doubt anything will go wrong.

In better food-finding news, I did find vinegar!

Actually, to give credit where credit is due, Ben found vinegar.

It was located, at Good Morning Mart, right below the corn syrup.  Just where you'd hope to find vinegar.  Along side something sickeningly sweet.  Actually, maybe that's where it would be in America, I think it was just the language barrier that really got me.  All English is in teeny, tiny letters at the bottoms of labels, so you don't immediately see it.  Plus, I tend to get self conscious quickly as Korean grocery stores are full of over zealous, over helpful staff and when I stand too long in one spot, staring, I'm always afraid I'll be accosted in Korean by a nice lady in a yellow shirt and orange apron who doesn't know what, "I'm just looking," means, nor, "Where the heck is your vinegar?"

I need to learn Korean.

What's the Korean word for, "vinegar"?

I got it though.  I'm not sure what kind of vinegar it is.  I wanted distilled white.  This is a little yellow, but it seemed like the most generic kind they had and it's perfectly fine as far as I can tell.  Maybe it's.. distilled yellow vinegar.

The more I cook, the more I long for American grocery store shelves, with their predictable order, their aisle numbers, their helpful signs and familiar ingredients.

Still, the hunt is challenging, and that in itself is fun.  Plus, I get to learn to make my own ingredients.

Like French's french fried onions, evaporated milk.  And chicken stock.

Let you know how all this goes!

- catie

Ben: Pictures of School Part II

[caption id="attachment_344" align="alignleft" width="294" caption="Sally Student"][/caption]

Here a couple more pictures of my students. I will get pictures of the other teachers soon (I just haven't had a chance yet).  These pictures are of my two  favorite classes.  They are both 100 level writing classes (so the kids are between 10-13 years old). Here is Sally student, Rebecca's arm, and part of Anna's  head. They are all in the Tuesday/Thursday 100D writing class. For most of the term Sally was the only student in the class. She is probably the funniest  student at Ewha. She knows enough English to be goofy and silly and love to ham it up. For two weeks she insisted that there was another student in the  classroom besides here and would only answer questions if I pointed to her after she raised her hand. She also wrote a paragraph about how I shouldn't  give her homework and another about her best friend, whose name is "Imaginary Electronic Computer Dictionary Friend." She is also really bright, and  even with two more students in the class, she is still the one who answers almost all the questions.

[caption id="attachment_345" align="alignright" width="294" caption="More Hangman"][/caption]

More hangman. The other thing about Korean hangman is that they don't always know how to spell the words they are having the other kids guess. So spaces will be erased or added halfway through the game and sometime the word will be entirely rewritten after 15 minutes have guessing has gone on. Also letters will sometimes be guessed, not written down, and than suddenly appear in the word. Despite all these problems, they still love it.

[caption id="attachment_346" align="alignleft" width="294" caption="Sally Stumping Rebecca and Anna"][/caption]

Here is my other awesome 100 Writing class. There are seven kids it in, and they are younger than most of the other 100 writing classes. They are also still super excited to at school learning, even though it is the third or fourth hagwon they have in addition to regular school. This is Harry, who is super smart and earnest, he got the "Best Student in Class" award that Ewha gives out, and he deserved it. The girl behind him is Lily, who is also egger to learn. Whenever I correct her homework she always demands to know what she did wrong and right (most students just want the teacher to sign off on it and not give them detention).




Lily and Harry wanted to me to take serious pictures of them. I took funnier pictures too, but they didn't turn out because I'm not very good at taking non-blurry pictures.

I know that my last post was a bit cynical, so hopefully you won't think that I can't stand any of my students. I really do have fun students and classes that are a blast. Even those classes in which I despair of the students ever learning anything are usually still fun to goof around with.

-Ben Teacher

Catie: Korean Pizza

Korean pizza is really not that bad.  Often a bit strange, but never so bad it's inedible.  Just so long as you stay away from the type with the sweet potatoes and prawns.  It's just not the same.

And really, nothing's the same as homemade pizza.

[caption id="attachment_335" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="PIZZA."][/caption]

And so, I have just put this little treasure into the oven.  It has grilled onions (I don't like crunchy onions on pizza -- but I like grilled onions on everything!), orange bell pepper, mozzarella, cheddar, parmesan, a delicious slightly sweet Korean sausage I took a chance on, and the tomatoes on top.  They're not as ripe as I'd like, but I didn't think cherry tomatoes would work as well in this instance. I was actually surprised by how soft and.. pink? the smaller tomatoes were today.  I got three that were workable.

Hopefully it tastes good.

The jury's still out on that...

- catie

Catie: Speculoos?

[caption id="attachment_327" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Speculaas."][/caption]

When we were kids, we used to eat these windmill cookies.  Sometimes they were shaped like other things, but mostly windmills.  So, that was what we called them, windmill cookies.  They were fun because they are dry and crunchy, so you can nibble and eat them really slowly.  Also they're windmills and they have holes in them.  Cookies with holes are fun.

Now that I am very old and eat them less because of their shape and more for their taste (a little like gingerbread), I have learned to call them, "Speculaas", the Dutch name.  It's a fun word to say.

But funner to EAT.

Today, I took the bus to LotteMart (it's like a 15 minute walk, but I get SO cold!  And there isn't a bus stop on the other side of the street to take me home again, so I do have to walk back...) to get some whipping cream for the pumpkin pie I'll make tomorrow and a couple other things and I was walking down the cookie aisle to get to the registers (btw, this is NEVER a good idea) when I spotted THESE.

[caption id="attachment_329" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Speculoos!"][/caption]

Advertised as Speculoos (apparently, the Flemish name for such cookies), they came in a long sleeve, all individually wrapped (sadly, not shaped like windmills, but I didn't even notice at the time) and I had to buy them.

I heart Speculaas at Christmastime because they're spicy and they're just really good holiday cookies.  I was so surprised to see them!

Also, they are very good with coffee and tea (if only they HAD very good coffee and tea here...) and I have -- maybe -- already eaten six of them.

Ben will be lucky if there are any left when he gets home! :D

- catie

Catie: Ben's mitt/ens

[caption id="attachment_314" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="the mitt/ens"][/caption]

We don't have a car -- though we'd be too scared to drive it if we did (the bus we were in got side swiped by a tiny, red geo-metro-esque car yesterday, which apparently was no big deal since the driver of the geo-metro-esque got out of his car, laughing) -- so, we do a lot of walking.

To the bus stop.  To the store.  To Ewha.  To eat out.  Back home from the bus stop.

You get the idea.

And it's FREEZING outside.

While we did each pack a coat, a hat, gloves and a scarf, we picked mostly utilitarian ones.  Most of them are fine, but some of them are downright ugly (very warm, just very ugly).  The worst of which is probably both our pairs of gloves.  They just aren't cute.

And so, Ben got these.  I know they look sort of blue, but they're really a smokey gray, not very blue at all.  They're knit out of a 100% superwash wool called PRIME, made in Italy.  They won't be as super warm as his giant, black eyesores (they're not really that bad), but when we're just walking around town, we usually have our hands in our pockets anyway.  And they button back from mittens into fingerless mitts when he needs his fingers.

I have to force myself to knit fairly mindless things this time of year or I'll bog myself down with a bunch of complicated, unfinished projects.  I already started doing it earlier in the month.  I'm easily frustrated by the feeling of never finishing projects.  Which is why I like socks and mittens.

I have a pair of socks in the works again, too.  I'd forgotten to bring any "MAN" colored sock yarns with me from home, and it's pretty hard to find here, but we found a wool/acrylic blend at E-mart a few days ago (the same place I got the wool for the mitt/ens), in a variegated gray.  It's all a little drab, but I'm getting used to it.  There's just not a lot to choose from, especially as far as "MAN" colors go.

And soon, I want to knit me some form of fingerless gloves/mittens (hopefully cuter than my huge, black eyesores).  We'll see how it goes.

Maybe there will be more to post on the knitting front.

- catie

Catie: Pretty persimmons

[caption id="attachment_305" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="My three persimmons."][/caption]

Yesterday, I bought three persimmons for making something persimmon-y.  The most popular things made from persimmons in the western world seem to be persimmon cookies and pudding.  In Korea, it's really hard to say.  I think they do a lot more raw-eating of persimmons than most people in America would dream of doing.  Perhaps mostly because a lot of Americans have no idea what a persimmon really is.

I think they're a nice looking fruit.  At our grocery store, DreamMart (which should really be called Good Morning Mart, but the Korean word for, "Good Morning" sounds like, "Dream") we occasionally get them confused with tomatoes because they're displayed upside down, so just their roundy little bottoms show and (sadly, for us), their orange sort of color is the same color as the rock-hard, never-ripe tomatoes they sell here.  Although, as it gets colder, the tomatoes get greener, so it's becoming increasingly easier to tell the difference.

We just hope they're better than the tomatoes.

It's only getting colder here and while we keep our windows open to counteract our over-compensating water/floor heater, the Koreans turn their heat to 80 C and leave it there.  We've done more sweating since it got cold than before, when it was hot outside!

We were pretty afraid they might not heat their buses, but now I have to put on a long sleeved shirt, my fleece jacket, a scarf, my double layer wool hat and gloves to stand at the bus stop, and then take them off inside the bus, just to put them right back on once we get out.  Koreans leave all theirs on, though.  And, literally, it's about 80 degrees on that bus.

Yeah, you think I'm exaggerating, but I am not.

On Friday, I made 60 Minute Rolls, also known as DeeDee's One Hour Buns, which, really, is totally a better name.  Anytime you have the choice to say a phrase with, "DeeDee" in it, you really should.  These opportunities don't arise very often.

I've only seen one kind of yeast here, a turkish yeast, "Pakmaya".

Very aptly named.

It's an instant yeast, which is kind of nice.  Some people seem to swear by instant yeast.  But, apparently, there is no way to test whether or not it's alive.  Sure, they'll tell you about 1,500 different ways to test it, but it will fail every single of them and, in the end, still make DeeDee's buns rise.

I tried to foam tepid sugar water.

I tried to foam warm sugar water.

I tried to foam sugar water that was probably too warm.

I even tried mixing flour, sugar and water and waiting an hour to see if it would rise -- although the problem with that was mostly just that I got too impatient and decided to go ahead, regardless.

Finally, I mixed up a batch of dough and started kneading it, kneading it, kneading it.  I was probably 5 -6 minutes into the 10 minute process when I realized that our grimy table was griming my DeeDees!

I wash that thing every day, too, so don't think it's anything I've done to it.  It just has this weird black top with a gray splatter paint sort of pattern and I think the gray comes off, because it turns all my dishcloths gray and has since we moved in, I just didn't even think about it!

So, I made another batch -- argh -- and kneaded it on a big white tray we have that came with our cozy little... bingo parlor.

Kneading takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r, fyi.  I worked at a bakery, and I think I took the bread mixers for granted, because, seriously, I thought my arms would give out before I got a, "silky, elastic texture".

Once I had them all ball-rolled and plopped into the pie pan, I was still pretty terrified that they wouldn't rise (and after all that, I wasn't taking any chances), so I boiled some water in the electric teapot, poured it into a coffee mug and set it on top of the Trusty Crousty (which I turned on low, the top gets real hot) with a chopstick inside it.  Then I put the DeeDees right next to it and draped a towel over the whole set up.

They rose FAST.

Let me just reiterate -- F-A-S-T.

I thought to myself, "I will go to DreamMart and get some things for dinner."  DreamMart is only two and a half blocks away, nothing could happen.

Is it ironic that I over-proofed them?

[caption id="attachment_310" align="alignleft" width="225" caption="As you can see, I did at least TRY to eat them.."][/caption]

I have trouble figuring out what irony is.

Regardless, in the end, they went the way of the first batch of dough.  Sadly.  But, to the DeeDees credit, they did taste good.  They were just too weird and dry.  They were the best right out of the oven.  After that... you know, kinda downhill.

They looked cute.

I will try again, bread is something I can fiddle with over a long period of time, I think, and so I probably will.  It's interesting and tad bit finicky, which seems like fun.

There are my DeeDees.

The main problem with bread recipes over the internet, though, is that no one -- lie detector says: maybe 3 people -- bake bread the old fashioned way anymore.  Everybody uses their bread machines.  Which is all well and good, until you move to Korea and all the bread machines are in KOREAN.

Then you're stuck the Trusty Crousty, but no Beard on Bread or whatever in sight.

I guess converting from machine to oven isn't too difficult, though, and I will be trying it.

For tonight, however, I am making fresh applesauce.  And I wanted to make sweet and sour chicken, but was completely floored by the fact that DreamMart doesn't seem to carry vinegar.  It's bizarre.  I have seen vinegar.  I have seen vinegar everywhere.  And all I need is white vinegar.

Come to think of it, though, I don't know that I've ever seen plain, white vinegar.  Which.. I mean, really?  No white vinegar?  Really?  How hard could it possibly be?  They eat squid, that's hard. That make kimchi, constantly, all the time and that's no easy trick.  And they.. you know.. read the space age scrawl that is the Korean language.

They make all their medications in-country!

You'd expect a little white vinegar, now, wouldn't you?

So, now we are having stir-fry.  Neither as good nor as fun as sweet and sour chicken, but I am at a vinegar loss.  I thought about possibly using lemon juice, but, after my DeeDee failure, I need something to turn out properly, so I'm sticking to what I know.

Maybe next time.

Also, Thanksgiving is out.  But we will have pie.  So, I'll let you know how that goes.

- catie

Ben: Pictures of School

[caption id="attachment_285" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Peace Teacher!"][/caption]

Korean kids are pretty stinking cute, but don't be fooled by this kid's smiling facade. I can't even count the number of times I've caught him trying to cheat on his spelling test or writing his homework for the next class during my class. No Korean kids are really cute (except for middle school students, who are punks, but than what middle schooler isn't). Catie has been telling me for sometime that I need to put pictures of my school and students up on our blog. The last couple of days have been the final days of this term, so since little work is actually getting done I thought I would take advantage of the chaos and get some pictures. I will also be posting pictures of the other teachers so that everyone can put faces to the names of the people I'm working with.

[caption id="attachment_286" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Andrew giving Scott some love"][/caption]

This is part of my 99D Writing class. Again, don't be fool by the apparent innocence, this class is trouble! There are 7 boys and the two girls you can just barely see  behind Andrew and Scott. At the start of the term this class was just the 7 unruly boys who with the except of a kid named Fire (more on him latter) cannot sit still or stay quiet to save their lives. Bryan, Aaron, and I all teach this classes and we have yelled, threatened, and bribed ourselves to exhaustion trying to keep their attention for at least part of the 40 minute class. No luck yet. Two weeks ago, the first girl (named Anna) showed up in the class (that happens allot, since it is private after school academy kids appear and disappear from class very randomly). Since she was the only girl in a glass of 7 boys, we didn't figure she'd last very long. (Equally mixed gender classes seem to work best for classroom management. When you have all of either gender it is just madness. The worst though is having all boys/all girls and just one girl/one boy, because then they sit all by themselves and are alienated from the rest of the class).  She stuck it out however, and a week latter Yumi showed up and since than they have slid right into the spirit of the class, shirking their homework, cheating on spelling tests, and talking with the best of the boys.

[caption id="attachment_288" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Fire and Sam"][/caption]

Two of the best students from 99D. This is Fire and Sam, far and away the sharpest sticks in this box of mostly broken pencils. Fire is one of my favorite students. He is super earnest and determined to study like crazy. I don't know how his parents have done it, but they've successfully indoctrinated him that he must study, study, study. Most of the parents tell their kids that, but the kids are all overloaded with regular school, 4-6 hagwons a week, and than extra studying for tests on Saturdays. By the time they get to Ewha many of them are burned out and couldn't care less. Fire is still going full steam though. Just to give you an idea of his attitude, he wrote an essay about his least favorite food, which is persimmons. He wrote that he hated the color, the taste, the texture, and how when when he tried it he felt sick. The part that is heart wrenching is the end where he says, "But my mom says that they are really good for my health, so I will still eat them even though I don't like them at all." Most of his essays conclude with something along this line, that even though he doesn't like it, if his parents say that he needs to do it, he will do his best.

The other kid in the picture is Sam, who is bright, if not quiet as dedicated as Fire. He was part of the Andrew and Scott clique at the start of the class, but sometime after midterms he must have decided it was time to shape up. How does one shape up? Well to start they move next to the smart kids and somehow their spelling test scores dramatically improve.

A common exchange:

Me: "Sam! Eyes on your own test!"

Sam: "Oh! Teacher! I not look!"

Despite this persistent cheating, Sam has improved dramatically in other, non-Fire related ways.

[caption id="attachment_293" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Hangman!"][/caption]

I don't know if you can tell, but the girls up front are playing Hangman, the all time favorite game of the students at my school. They tend to go crazy playing it, shouting and pushing their way to the front of the class, so the game is officially banned at Ewha, except for very special days. Their hangman strategy is to skip guessing letters and go straight to trying to guess the word. They also don't finish the game until the word is guessed, no matter how many tries that takes. This results in some very detailed pictures. I've tried to tell them that they should at least guess the vowels, but they aren't having any of it.

[caption id="attachment_294" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Louise 1"][/caption]

This kid is in the same class as the girls in the previous picture. His name is Louise 1. At the start of the term his name was just Louise (pronounced like Lewis), but than a new boy came to class and decided that he too would like to be called Louise (also pronounced like Lewis).  I couldn't believe it when I saw his name on the attendance sheet, written as "Louise 2," but it was true. So now 97D has Louise 1 and Louise 2, equally unmotivated and easily distracted (right before this picture Louise 1 threw Louise 2's pencil out the window.

More pictures to come!