I recently realized how much work I have to do to get this cookbook written and I started to spend more time panicking than blogging. So I am going to take a tip from a good friend of mine and take stock of what I’ve done this year.
Since March, I’ve cooked 21 Korean Sunday dinners and worked on 98 recipes. Each dinner included anywhere from 6-12 people. In total, I’ve fed about 69 different people, many of whom have come multiple times. I’ve made new friends, people who I met simply because they were willing to come eat at a stranger’s house. (There are a surprising number of you out there.) I’m not as close to having well-developed versions of recipes as I’d like, but I’ve made a lot of progress. This isn’t even counting the number of dishes Diane’s cooked, the number of people she’s fed. I think we might actually finish this book. Not this year, but next!
I’ve been working on writing up my notes from our incredible trip to Korea in September-October, but it’s been hard to find time between the cooking, the recipe-revising, the other job, and life. But I hope to get something up soon, and in the meantime, here is a somewhat unattractive photo of the galbi–jim (braised short ribs with chestnuts, jujubes, and shitake mushrooms) I made last night. I used Diane’s great-aunt’s recipe — she soaks the ribs in Coca-Cola for 3 hours to “draw out the blood” and she doesn’t use sesame oil and sesame seeds, which is almost as shocking and scandalous as the use of soda.
It was delicious. I was proud. Onwards.
One Fork, One Spoon 