'Tis the Season

1. Cloudy coin purse, 2. Silver lining
It's the rainy season on the Korean peninsula. Last weekend, the weather gods taunted us with a solid wall of non-stop showers. I'm not one of those people who likes walks in the rain (nor piña coladas), so we've been staying indoors, watching DVDs, reading and peering out at our rain-soaked courtyard as precipitation pelts away at our tiled roof. I've been getting a lot of crafting done.

I'd been itching to make something other than iPod cozies for a while. But even after a ton of sketches in my notebook, I didn't have any designs I was particularly excited about. Finally, all this rain yielded some inspiration. Cloudy coin purses with raindrop zipper pulls were the result. Now it can rain money! And, for an extra dose of optimism, every cloud is stitched with silver thread... Each purse comes with two pins: a sunny badge and a thunderin-n-lightnin' badge. You can switch 'em up depending on your mood or the weather. Or use both if you're feelin' kinda crazy. Go check out the clouds in my Etsy shop...


1. 5kg of tomatoes, 2. Cross section
Well all this rain is good for something. Our little cherry tomato plant is sprouting mini-tomatoes nonstop. We can't eat them fast enough. But sometimes mini tomatoes just don't cut it and you yearn for something meatier, jucier...

A few weeks ago, a friend who I hadn't seen in a while e-mailed out of the blue. She lives about two hours southwest of Seoul on her family's farm in Jecheon (제천), and she wanted to know if she could send us some of their organic tomatoes. Sixteen gorgeous, fat, vine-ripened tomatoes arrived by messenger the next day, and thus began 7 days of tomato-cooking and tomato-eating.


Gazpacho recipe
First, I made gazpacho. It made for a refreshing and light appetizer for my friend's potluck lunch.
Then I made some tomatoes with scrambled eggs, a yummy Chineses homestyle dish whenever my stomach is homesick. For brunch, the tomatoes went into an omelet with cheese. And after I picked up a baguette at Paris Croissant I made some garlicky bruschetta as well. Yummy.

And finally, two quarts of tomato sauce. One quart was my typical chunky "kitchen sink" sauce where I throw in ground pork, bell peppers, onions, mushrooms, chili peppers, you name it. The other quart I went with this enticing summer recipe from 101 Cookbooks. I hadn't realized that such a light recipe could be so good! The only ingredients in there were the tomatoes, some tomato paste, extra virgin olive oil and some red pepper flakes for a good kick, but despite the simplicity (or maybe because of it) it was addicting.

Growing up in New York, I was pretty much spoiled when it came to having any kind of food, any time of year. It seems silly, but for 30... someodd... years it never really occurred to me that there were seasons for foods. If I wanted oranges, there were oranges in the supermarket. If I wanted bananas or strawberries, bananas and strawberries were in season somewhere in the world, so there they were in the produce section. Everything could be flown or trucked in from anywhere. I had no idea what time of year was the season for tomatoes.

But then again, I hadn't experienced the joy of locally grown, organic, in-season, vine-ripened tomatoes like these, so I didn't know what I was missing. Mmmm.

When I met my friend for coffee last week, we talked about her family farm. They have four greenhouses that are right now -- late June through July -- full of tomatoes and green chili peppers. A little later, during September and October -- red chili peppers will show up on the scene. And later still, in the fall, lettuce. Actually, there are two harvests for lettuce, one in spring and one in the fall. These days, their one cow has been eating a lot of tomatoes, as has been the rest of the family.


1. Vacation, 2. Sea urchins
The rainy summer is not the season for seafood, however. When we showed up at Noryangjin seafood market last weekend, the place was eerily quiet. Our favorite fishmonger was nowhere to be seen, and a Styrofoam board with a "gone for vacation" message scrawled on it was placed on top of his stall's empty tanks. Then we looked around and realized that nearly 80% of the stalls at Noryangjin were closed for vacation until August 3.

We were at Noryangin because Gavin and I had seen a TV program featuring the women abalone divers of Jejudo. They were saying it was sea urchin season, which got the both of us salivating for uni or, in Korean, 성게 (song-gei). True enough, the spiky little fellows were there. We ordered up some, and they arrived at our table, somewhat haphazardly cracked open with their guts spilling forth, moments later. Yup, Korean-style raw fish, or 회 (hui) isn't as prettily-arranged as sashimi, but it gets the job done.

Actually, in case you were interested, it's not sea urchin roe that you're eating when you're savoring uni. It's the mashed up gonads. But don't let that deter you; they're really very tasty, a kind of savory-with-a-hint-of-sweet combination that's kind of addicting. However. Our sea urchins lacked a certain something. They weren't bad, but they didn't seem "ready." Disappointingly, there weren't that many mashed-up gonads inside. And whoever cracked the little suckers open didn't do a good job; there were loose spikes all over the plate and -- ick -- inside the sea urchins as well. It made for a prickly meal.

So, when is the sea urchin season? I did some studious Googling and discovered that, in Korea (specifically on Jeju Island), July is the spawning season for sea urchins. So we were on time, after all. But the spawning season is also when the urchin innards are least tasty. Oh.

These days, I've been hearing a lot about the 100-mile diet, reducing one's carbon footprint by making sure your meal didn't travel the typical 1,500 miles from farm-to-plate that most North American foods do. But South Korea isn't so big, so even if we sit in Noryangjin market in Seoul and eat a sea urchin from Jeju Island, we're still eating a kind of 280-mile diet. Hunting down information about what's-tastiest-at-what-time-of-year-and-where can sure be exhausting, though...

On a completely unrelated note, here are some robot links... Apparently, the future of robotics is.... cute!
I wanna see Wall-E!
Forget the 3G iPhone, I want THIS mp3 player! Cuter video here.
I can afford my very own robot bug.
Huggable robot.
MarsPhoenix tweets! And says "w00t"! And wants someone to send it a 3G iPhone!
Too bad I can't see Robot Chicken in Korea. Here are clips from their StarWars episodes on YouTube.