Hotteok cookin'

I've written before about my love hate relationship with food blogs. On the one hand, I LOVE having an infinite number of recipes at my fingertips. I LOVE being able to google recipes for things that I'm not even sure if they exist, and finding hundreds of choices. However, I don't love having to sift through backstories and "artsy" macro shots to get to the recipe. BUT, I'm going to venture into food blogger territory here, sort of. And by that I mean I'm going to be writing about food, with some pictures, though they are not at all aesthetically pleasing. When I'm taking pictures, my goal is not to find/arrange the perfect shot. Not blurry and semi straight are usually all I'm going for.
So if anyone shares similar feelings towards food blogs, feel free to skip this. But I've been baking since before baking became cool, before I was tall enough to reach the kitchen counter. So I've earned the right to write about food every now and again.

So, hotteok. I don't remember if I've mentioned hotteok before, but they're delicious. It's a fairly common street food in Korea. They're like a filled pancake, except made with a yeast dough. When I was there in January, I mailed myself a care package. In the care package, I included a box of hotteok mix. It sat in the cupboard for a long time, because shortly after I got home from Korea, I left for India, and shortly after I got home from India, I realized my stomach loved me a lot more if I didn't fill it up with gluten on a daily basis. 

One morning last week, I was trying to decide what I wanted to eat for breakfast when I saw the hotteok mix in the pantry. Hotteok is neither a breakfast food or a summer food for Koreans. However, not being Korean, their silly food rules are meaningless to me. Plus, I ran the Bix a few days later. Aren't sugar laden balls of fried dough what the experts are referring to when they talk of carboloading? 

The box says "hotteok mix" along with something else I don't remember underneath, and "cook and enjoy" on the back, and that was pretty much the extent of the English. When I lived in Korea, my friends and I would often buy a mix for a naanesque flat bread type stuff. We stumbled through making that without English instructions, so I thought, "Meh, whatever, I'll give this a go" 

The box contained three packages, two "premix" 

And one "jammix"... I speak Konglish well enough to know that Koreans would call the sugary peanutty filling in the middle of the hotteok "jam" and they would most definitely turn the word "mix" into a suffix, and there ya go, new word. 

I know the Korean words for water and minutes, so I found those, added the amount of water it said to the yeast, added the other pouch of premix, and let it sit for the amount of time it said. In Korea, the hotteok makers have dough balls ready and waiting for the customers, then make the hotteok as they are ordered. So I copied their process- I shaped the dough into golf ball sized balls, flattened them, and put a spoonful of jammix in each one.

Then I shaped them back into balls and flattened them again.

In Korea, they have a weird little tool thing they use to flatten them while they're cooking. I obviously don't have one of those, so I used a spatula. 

 The finished product was good, but not a whole lot like the real thing.   

 I very rarely use mixes when cooking or baking. So as I was making these, I thought to myself, this is just a yeast dough with some filling. Is a mix really necessary? I googled, and of course found lots of recipes. This seems like a good one, and the finished product looks totally legit. You'll have to scroll past some food bloggery shots and a backstory before getting to the actual recipe, naturally.

Venting like a tea kettle

240ish years ago, a brave group of men decided to give the British Monarchy the middle finger and our great country was born.

Fast forward to today.
Do you want to be interviewed for American news? Have a British accent and give us any bit of mindless drivel about the royal baby.

Why why why why why why why WHY DO WE CARE? WHY? WHYYYYYYYYY? What would George Dubya the Original and his other wig wearing friends think of this?

I've met a lot of really unlikable Brits. I make no secret of the fact they are not my favorite group of people. Plus their food is so bad that they try to claim curry as their own. Double strike. But even if I'd never crossed paths with treasures such as Bobby and NBG, and even if my favorite food was anything boiled, that would not change the fact that if you've been camped out in front of a hospital for TWO WEEKS, you need to take a step back and reevaluate your life because you've definitely taken a serious wrong step somewhere.

When I first started hearing about people waiting outside of the hospital, I though "Oh, paparazzi. What a strange life that would be!" Then I saw pictures of the hospital campers. They are not all people who use their obscenely expensive cameras to put food on the table. At this very moment, there are normal people standing outside of a hospital in England with their iPhones and little Canon Sure Shots, there for no other reason than to have a photo to upload to Instagram or Facebook with a hashtag about the royal baby. I feel the same way about hashtags as I do about the expression "just sayin"-once we eliminate both from our lives, the world will be a better place. But here are my royal baby hashtags: #Whocares? #Peoplehavebabieseveryday  #Forgiveusthomasjefferson #Wouldkatehavestayedwithwilliamafterhelosthishairifhewasntroyalty? #Arehashtagssupposedtohavepunctuation?

I don't wait in line for any kind of tickets. I don't bring my tent to Best Buy at the end of October so that I can score a sweet Black Friday deal on a giant TV. If there are more than 3 cars in line at the drive thru, I try to find a different restaurant. Needless to say, waiting is not my strong suit. But even so, I cannot imagine waiting in front of a hospital. How many games of Candy Crush Saga can a person play before realizing "whoa whoa whoa, I'm waiting in front of a hospital for what now? What happened to my life?"

But, my real problem with this isn't the people waiting in front of the hospital. Fine, if that's how they want to spend their time.  My problem with this is that it's unavoidable. I can't turn on the TV, listen to the radio, read the news, etc. without seeing or hearing something about this story. And for what? Waity Katie married into this family, and William was born into it. So while yes, they've done their good deeds because of their statuses, they haven't really earned anything. There have been a lot of baby comparisons between William/Kate and Kim/Kanye. Kim Kardashian sucks, and is famous for reasons along the same lines as William and Kate. But Kanye earned his fame, for being a rapper and a first rate @**hole. So at least North West has that going for her. Confession- Love Lockdown is on my running playlist.

I am so sick of this story, and the kid's not even here yet. I dodged the royal wedding bullet by being in Korea, where they really didn't care. Or maybe they did. Being blissfully oblivious is one of the good things about living somewhere you don't speak the language. Now I'm here, and subjected to such hard hitting stories like whether or not Kate will breastfeed, whether or not William will be in the delivery room, getting their "flat" ready for a baby, and of course what the kid's name will be.

Sure, it's worth a blurb or two, especially after the baby's born. But I've seen something about this multiple times a day for the past 6 weeks, and nothing has happened yet. Why why why why why why?

#Forgiveusthomasjefferson

Just sayin.

New Order

Someday, sometime, I will finish writing about India. Udaipur and Varanasi were my two favorite cities, and definitely deserve their days in the sun. But Mother Nature is giving us plenty of sun lately, as Sam Champion has told us every morning this week that we are under a heat advisory, and reminds us not to leave our kids and pets in the car. So this is not the time for Udaipur and Varanasi's days in the sun.

It's been a month of soul searching. I really don't like that term, but it's fitting. It also seems more all encompassing than simply saying "thinking" "reflection" or other words of that sort.

After a little more than 2 1/2 sometimes good, sometimes bad, lots of long distance years, I broke up with my boyfriend a few weeks ago. My always supportive mom bought me a few different kind of deliciously flavored vodka to help me through the tough times. But really, in the days since it happened, I've been feeling pretty good. The tough times have been very minimal, but I still drank the vodka.
Gone are the "YOU MUST RETURN TO KOREA" voices in my head. They've been replaced with much gentler "You can go to Korea, if you want. But, you love Europe. What about Europe? Or South America? Thailand is always fantastic, you can finally find out what it's like to live there!" I didn't realize how stuck I'd been feeling until I freed myself. I felt as though I had to return to Korea for this relationship, even though it wasn't a relationship I was always happy to be in. I've had a lot of anxiety about going back to Korea, which caused me to drag my feet for the past year. But at the same time, I always thought "What if I decide to return to Korea? If this relationship is to continue, he will need a green card. I will need a job that allows me the flexibility to leave for extended amounts of time" Enter my current restaurant/bar tending job and subbing.
Not anymore! For the first time, I've been able to think about doing different things. I still think about Korea, but with much less anxiety this time. But then it's overshadowed my dreams of learning Spanish in Spain, eating my weight in mangoes in Thailand, or baguette in France, riding those weird stumpy looking horses in Mongolia, or finally finally finally seeing Machu Picchu.

There's a definite order people do things-finish high school, go to college, start a career, move away from home, get married, have kids, retire, split retirement time between grandkids and traveling.

Not following the typical routine has never bothered me, per se.  And I mean this with no disrespect to everyone I know who is careering (I don't know if that's actually a word used like that, I feel like no, but you know what I mean) with a spouse and a couple kids. It's wonderful. Weddings are fun, extra fun if you have good cake. Babies are cute. But, that's not for me, at least not right now. I quickly skim most of the baby pictures that fill up my Facebook newsfeed, but I spend more time than I care to admit looking at anyone and everyone's travel pictures. I feign interest until I can duck away during my coworkers frequent talk of what their kids are doing, but I feign work in certain areas to be able to eavesdrop on tables I hear talking about traveling, or tables with accents so I can guess where they are from. I love nothing more than walking through immigration in a foreign airport.

So now, I have this wonderful freedom. And for the first time, maybe ever, I've been thinking more seriously of getting a "real" job here in good ol' USA. Monster.com is now one of my most visited sites, according to the Google Chrome new tab window. When it comes right down to it though, the only jobs I see that really get me excited are the ones that involve living overseas. So why the consideration of finding a job here? The last two birthdays have been doozies. I'm starting to feel old. What if I wake up one morning and want what everyone else has?
I wouldn't trade my years living abroad for anything anything anything in the world. They were hands down the best years of my life. I want more years abroad. They changed me in so many ways, I'm not sure I'd recognize Laura from 5 years ago. But, while I was teaching "I Just Can't Wait to be King" to French babies, my peers were pairing up and getting married. While I was living the Rora Teacher dream in Seoul, my peers were becoming parents. Is the cost of my decision to live abroad my happily ever after ending? Sometimes I want to want what other people have.  I don't want to be alone forever, but I also don't like feeling tied down. I want a partner in crime. I want someone who doesn't look at me like I'm insane when I say I want to work at an elephant sanctuary in Thailand and then travel around India. I want someone who says "That's a fantastic idea. I'll pack my bag!" Is that too much to ask? Where do I meet my kindred adventurous spirit?  Probably not here, that much I know. In the almost 2 years I've been back from Seoul, I've been asked a wide variety of facepalm questions, ranging from "What's life like in a third world country?" to "How were things in England?" That doesn't bother me so much. At least it's something, an attempt at showing interest in what I've done, an A for effort.

I expect big changes in the next couple months. Maybe I'll try a job here, in a perfect world on a coast somewhere. Maybe I'll dust off my passport and expat shoes. Don't hold your breath for a "save the date" card from me anytime soon, but at least hopefully my parents will have another empty room at their house again.