What Every Teacher’s Kitchen Needs
I knew a friend who came to Seoul to teach for one year who never cooked himself a thing. For 364 days of the year he spent in Seoul. He always ate out. And this is possible simply because of the wide availability of cheap food such as kimbap rolls or rice with stews (like jjigae).
Anyway, it turned out on the last night before flying back to Canada he was rummaging his cabinets and found a brass pot, common to old Korea, the vintage ones still widely used to cook ramen noodles. He went downstairs to the convenience store, bought several items, and threw together out of curiosity a masterpiece of hunger I shall never know. “I couldn’t believe I wasted a year of my life not trying to cook! This is amazing!” he proclaimed, exasperated at the wonderful tastes he concocted.
He had made his first mandu soup (dumplings in broth), and it became his favorite for the next year while he attended grad school in Vancouver.
Let this be a lesson to you! Get some cookware as soon as you settle in. Going abroad to work as a teacher, or as with any position, is an adventure. On the other hand, moving into a place in an international city is not. It’s just like any other move you made such as during college (unless you lived in a dorm for four years) or immediately afterwards.
Why in the world would anyone deny themselves the chance to cook healthy, delicious home food, or to be courageous enough to attempt to cook local food? I’m one of the rare ones who actually had all my cookware (2 pans, one of them cast iron, some glassware, cooking utensils, a pasta strainer, and electric mixers) shipped to me thinking incorrectly that I wouldn’t be able to find a pasta strainer here. (I found a better one in a box store called Mr. Kim’s that reminds me of Target.)
So here’s my recommendation on the basics and why. No more single pots for Mac N’ Cheese (or the equivalent, ramen). Try to start with a medium or large frying pan starting at 9-inches. This is your central tool for frying eggs, sauteing chicken, and cooking veggies. If you like steak, or searing meats, I suggest a cast iron pan. It was really expensive to ship, I suggest you find one here. Other things such as glassware can be found in stores such as: Costco (would you believe it, yes, they’re in Seoul), Lotte Mart, e-Mart, Homever, and others– the latter of which are all large, spacious, suburban type stores. I could swear by it but the soccer moms in Korea are like, exactly the same as the soccer moms in San Francisco. It’s a trippy experience indeed.
I digress. Before my long list gets too boring, I would like to recommend one item of particular use. It’s called a mixer, (or to pronounce in Korean-English, a mix-uh-gi). These small coffee grinder like blenders can make for you the most wonderfully refreshing fruit smoothies. I remember paying up to 8-dollars (US) for these things. Koreans used to love something called bubble tea, but they have never lost faith in fruit smoothies. Neither have I.
Last tip. I snagged the above photo from the New York Times’ Mark Bittman, a minimalist cook I admire. Here’s the link to a story about the perfect no frills kitchen cookware. I think that will help you, but for which I didn’t have the cash yet to fulfill. What do you use to cook?
–Sally is a writer from San Francisco who studies at Yonsei University’s Graduate School if International Studies (GSIS).
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