It's called Korean braised pot roast and normally I would run away from this one fast. But I am hungry and I am shopping and I am crisscrossing the aisles to double up on the free samples. And besides my favorite store clerk is handing out the little chunks of brown meat. She only comes to my shoulder and she walks with kind of a shuffling side-to-side penguin gait and when she smiles her face is a sea of creases. She's so damn cute I just want to ask her, can I do something for you, anything, anything at all! She wants me to buy a pot roast and I do and I take her recipe with me.
The ingredients always call for something you do not have in your cupboard. I'm onto their money-making strategies, but I was hungry I tell you and this was the only thing I wanted to eat. I open my newly purchased bottle of spicy hot chili sauce, the one with all the Chinese symbols on the side and take a taste - stupid unassuming American cook that I am. Luckily there was a half bottle of Dansai on the counter or there would have been a hole in my cheek by the time I ran to the sink. I mix everything together, an odd conglomerate of ingredients, even a pear, garsh what will these Koreans think of next and put everything in the food processor. I love recipes that call for electrical gadgetry but I forget about the side opening and there is an explosion and then a sticky orange-brown paste is covering a large portion of the kitchen as well as myself and the stuff is starting to burn the hair off my skin. Great balls of fire, what sort of devilish substance is this? I never quite trusted those Koreans. I saw every single episode of Mash and that Hawkeye knew what he was talking about.
It sits in the crock pot for hours and it's just not reaching that fall apart tender stage of cooked meat that my smiling friend offered to me yesterday. I swear the thing is taunting me, its unnatural color and odor not familiar by American standards. The original recipe probably called for dog meat and that would explain why it doesn't smell right.
Is this what I will offer my family for the evening repast? Surely, anything would be safer, even those nitrate-filled, salt-riddled hot dogs sitting in the back of the fridge. I go with the Korean stinky meat and make extra potatoes in case Big Dave snubs the entree. Before I know it he is sopping up the juice from two sandwiches and his face has not turned green nor is he clutching his abdomen. I go back to my meatless plate and ask him to pass the potatoes.
The ingredients always call for something you do not have in your cupboard. I'm onto their money-making strategies, but I was hungry I tell you and this was the only thing I wanted to eat. I open my newly purchased bottle of spicy hot chili sauce, the one with all the Chinese symbols on the side and take a taste - stupid unassuming American cook that I am. Luckily there was a half bottle of Dansai on the counter or there would have been a hole in my cheek by the time I ran to the sink. I mix everything together, an odd conglomerate of ingredients, even a pear, garsh what will these Koreans think of next and put everything in the food processor. I love recipes that call for electrical gadgetry but I forget about the side opening and there is an explosion and then a sticky orange-brown paste is covering a large portion of the kitchen as well as myself and the stuff is starting to burn the hair off my skin. Great balls of fire, what sort of devilish substance is this? I never quite trusted those Koreans. I saw every single episode of Mash and that Hawkeye knew what he was talking about.
It sits in the crock pot for hours and it's just not reaching that fall apart tender stage of cooked meat that my smiling friend offered to me yesterday. I swear the thing is taunting me, its unnatural color and odor not familiar by American standards. The original recipe probably called for dog meat and that would explain why it doesn't smell right.
Is this what I will offer my family for the evening repast? Surely, anything would be safer, even those nitrate-filled, salt-riddled hot dogs sitting in the back of the fridge. I go with the Korean stinky meat and make extra potatoes in case Big Dave snubs the entree. Before I know it he is sopping up the juice from two sandwiches and his face has not turned green nor is he clutching his abdomen. I go back to my meatless plate and ask him to pass the potatoes.
1 comment:
You could make a fortune bottling the sauce and marketing it as a facial hair remover. Look out Nair!
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