Foreign students pose after making bibimbap or rice with mixed vegetables at the Hanok Center in Jeonju, North Jeolla Province on Friday. /Newsis

Via Chosun Ilbo.

I will be interesting see if commenter Dr. Yu who lives in Brazil can verify if this story is making any news in Brazil.

Via Korean Beacon.

I love a dish that has an amazing history and “story-telling” attributes; there must have been a few tales of the old days shared over this dish no doubt.

This is the original “fusion” dish, with ingredients from disparate countries married out of pure necessity, which seems to be the way with most Korean classics. Invented around the 1950’s in Gyeonggi Province, there are two city names that are well known for their versions of this delicious stew – Uijeongbu budae jjigae and Songtan budae jjige. Why these regions? This is where the US army base was.

After the war ended in 1953 Koreans were very poor and food was scarce, but frequently people who lived near the US military bases were lucky enough to get some sausages, hotdogs and canned meats. With this they stretched the ingredients out to make it last and created the very famous budae jjigae stew. Little did they know that they would start a phenomenon that is as strong as ever 56 years later!  [10 Magazine]

Click the link to learn about some good locations to try budaejjigae at in Korea.  Besides the great budaejjigae that my wife makes I recommend heading up to Uijongbu and try the budaejjigae restaurant right next to the now closed down Camp Kyle, Kumo Restaurant (금오식)당:

If you don’t know where Camp Kyle is then just take a cab to the Home Plus and you can walk to the restaurant from there.  I was actually introduced to this restaurant when I used to have lunch periodically with a Uijongbu city official.  If it is good enough for a Uijongbu local to eat at, it is good enough for me.  Here is a picture of the restaurant’s budaejjigae dish I took the last time I was there:

This is some good stuff and I the reason why whenever I am in Uijongbu I always make it a point to stop by this restaurant.

Kimchi brings both health and beauty, according to devotees trying to promote Korea’s most famous food – a pickled and fermented vegetable dish – to the wider world.

“You know why there are so many beautiful women in Korea and Korean women have such smooth skin? It’s because they have been grown on kimchi,” claims Kim Sung-Hoon, who chairs the upcoming Gwangju Kimchi Festival.

“If you want to age gracefully and have beautiful skin, eat Korean kimchi,” said Kim, a former agriculture minister.  (………)

“I would like to say to foreigners: Eat Korean kimchi a lot,” said Professor Song Yeong-ok of the Kimchi Research Institute at Busan National University. Lactic acid bacteria and plant chemicals may help retard skin aging and reduce cholesterol, she said.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

I’ll tell you one thing that kimchi doesn’t cure, it is swine flu because ironically the Gwangju Kimchi Festival was canceled because of swine flu fears.

More than 700 kg of samgyeopsal – pork fatback – will be consumed by 5,000 people on Sept. 19 in an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the number of people eating pork at one event.

Korea holds the current world record, set in 2003 when the Seoul Yeouido Livestock Festival fired up grills more than 100 meters long and brought together 2,000 hungry folks for a juicy feast and record-setting event.

This time, organizers say, the grills will be twice as long and more than double the number of partiers will be called out to enjoy grilled pork as they go for another world record.

The event is part of Insamgol Festival, a ginseng promotion event, and will take place in a sports park in Jeungpyeong, North Chungcheong Province.  [Korea Herald via the Korea Rum Diary]

If you have nothing planned next week what better way to spend a weekend then eating 700 kg of samgyupsal?

As Lee Won-bok arranged his posters one Saturday at a busy outdoor pedestrian mall, passersby peeked over his shoulder in dismay and horror.

Some covered their eyes. But hundreds also clamored to sign Lee’s petition to outlaw a traditional culinary practice here: the eating of dog meat.

Each weekend, the 45-year-old animal rights activist stages a graphic photo display of dogs kept in cages, hanged and butchered, their meat prepared for market. He knows the images are hard to look at. But that’s precisely his point, to show the harsh treatment of an animal that many South Koreans now view as companions, not cuisine.

For years, foreign advocates have railed against the practice of butchering dogs and cats. Although Koreans have eaten dogs for centuries, the habit became more prevalent during the privations that followed the Korean War. It eventually spread from the poor and elderly to be adopted by the more affluent as niche cuisine.

Most protests were dismissed as the unwanted opinions of outsiders. But as the country has acquired more trappings of Western culture, the number of pet owners has exploded, and South Koreans are taking the lead in promoting animal rights here.  [LA Times]

I don’t have a problem with Koreans eating dog meat and that is what unfortunately many activists in the west have condemned the Koreans for doing instead of focusing on the conditions these dogs are kept in like this group in the article is doing.  Dog meat in Korea is something particular to Korean culture just like eating beef is part of American culture. In some areas of the world such as India eating beef is frowned upon. In other areas eating pork is frowned upon. Other countries eat horses. There is a lot of differences in cuisine all across the world. So if Koreans want to eat dog they should not be prevented from doing so and those of us who do not eat dog meat should not judge Koreans negatively for doing so.

However, how they kill the dogs is something I think can be criticized.  I can still remember being out in the field one night near the Imjim River and one of my soldiers calling me on the radio from his position complaining about a continuous ghost like sound.  So I went over to his position and heard the strange noise as well.  Curious, I walked down the hill their position was on and towards the noise and eventually came upon a small compound with a dog strung up and an ajushi beating the dog.  If you never heard it before a dog being beat to death makes the most pitiful noise you can imagine.

However, here is what Joe recommends the Korean government do to promote Korean food, which I think is just an ingenious idea:

With impeccable timing to prove my point, reader Edward brings to my attention a post by Food Comma that L.A. has just finished a Korean BBQ festival and contest.  I’ve been making the rounds to any Korean who would bother to listen to me that Korea, with all its festivals, really needs a BBQ festival.  Can you believe they don’t have any?  They have a giant festival for rice cakes but not one for BBQ?

Read the whole thing, but Joe is absolutely right that a Korean BBQ festival has the potential to be huge if it is marketed properly to the foreign and military communities in Korea.  As Joe shows in his posting Korean BBQ festivals are even having success in the US.  As much as the Korean government likes to push kimchi festivals on foreigners it is Korean BBQ that they should be promoting instead.

We heard recently from some Korean friends about a Mexican restaurant near Osan Air Base that they’d liked a lot. So we stopped in for lunch recently.

La Casa del Mexicano, which opened in January 2008, is owned by Catherine Kim, who also owns two Thai restaurants — Chang Pwuck and Sawatdee — and a Japanese restaurant she opened in May, Izakaya. All are in the Shinjang Mall area.

The cooks at La Casa are from Mexico City, Kim told us, and they make all the dishes on the premises, including the salsa dips. They also have a machine on which they make tortillas.

On the menu are enchiladas, tacos, fajitas and numerous other Mexican menu standards. Most dishes are made with either chicken or beef. But shrimp and pork are also on the menu.

Among those most popular with customers are enchilada verde, queso carne and champi pechuga con queso, Kim said.  [Stars & Stripes]

The next time I am in the Osan area I will definitely have to check this place out.

As a connoisseur of kimchi, South Korea’s national dish, Kim Soon-ja takes a package of the fermented cabbage everywhere — even overseas.

But there has always been one indelicate matter: how to mask the garlicky and often offensively pungent odor.

“My tour guide asked me not to take out my kimchi in public because it can be distasteful to foreigners,” Kim, 56, says of a trip to Europe several years ago.

Instead of being insulted, Kim went to work on a novel culinary concept that in this country was about as revolutionary as the seedless watermelon: She wanted to take the funky odor out of her beloved kimchi, which ranks among odoriferous global foods such as Limburger cheese and China’s “stinky tofu.”

The ambitious curly-haired woman had already been named by the South Korean Food Ministry in 2007 as the nation’s first kimchi master, a designation that honors her mastery of the dish. Working with a team of food experts, she set to work to come up with a new type of freeze-dried pickled cabbage that doesn’t smell even after water is added, appealing to both foreigners and the fussiest Korean eaters.

Kim says she is the first to create freeze-dried kimchi and has secured a patent.

All I know is I wish someone would invent bullad that didn’t smell.