In My Mother's Kitchen

It being Mother's Day weekend I thought this subject would be appropriate - forgive me ahead of time because I might ramble...

I learned how to cook in my mother's kitchen - the "wild" you might say. There's no such thing as health codes, dishwashers, mise en place, line chefs, sous chefs or anything in my mother's kitchen. I am all of that in my mother's kitchen. It started when I was really little, one of my first memories is making mandoo (dumplings) with my mom & my older sister. We would sit around the table with this HUGE SATELLITE DISH of a stainless steel bowl filled to the brim with the filling, and dozens of packs of dumpling skins in a pile... Every family has their own recipe & method to put together dumplings & my mom never measures anything so I can't really share the family recipe. We would take a Saturday afternoon or something & form seemingly thousands of dumplings (hey from my short vantage point, it was like a mountain of mandoo). My mother directing us to not be so greedy with the filling, seal the seams shut w. a little water, make sure not to leave air in the pocket, try to fold it pretty b/c who wants to eat ugly food. She would say something to the effect of - if you eat pretty food then you will grow up to be pretty. (I was thinking, who wants to be pretty? I want to be SMART - even as a little kid I was a bit "rebellious").

Anyone who knows me or my sister, knows that our mother loves to feed people. I tell people that once you cross the threshold - it's game over. She likes to think that everyone is a starving street urchin & will do everything in her power to feed you to your breaking point. When my sister was in HS her friends would make a point to come to our house... Why? Because they knew we always had food. I remember a couple times we would have a brand new box of instant noodles one day but then half of it would be gone the next day. I think that were times when my mom would go food shopping specifically with thinking about after school snacks in mind. I had a few friends over for dinner once in HS & it was a production. All of a sudden we were making things that my mom hadn't made in YEARS and I would demand to know why she hadn't made it in so long... My friends benefitted that day for sure.

Dinner parties at our house were like my mom's Olympics. There would be a flurry of dusting, vacuuming, washing every piece of china we had, washing all the silverware, multiple trips to the Korean market. Wash this, chop that, slice this, season that, fry this, roast that, boil this, steam that... Menu planning always made my head spin. It would take her DAYS to prepare dinner but it would only take about an hour for it to be consumed. As I grew older, I "graduated" in the kitchen - my mom laid more of the cooking tasks to me along with the usual prep work she made me do. Before there was Kyochon or Bon Chon chicken there was my mom's black chicken. We called it black chicken b/c the soy sauce would make the wings super dark. There are certain dishes my mom is known for - seafood japchae (pan fried cellophane noodles), flank steak in a kalbi marinade, green salad w. secret ingredient dressing, seafood pancakes, Korean-style fried calamari, the sandwiches she used to pack me for lunch in jr. high & high school. (I'm not kidding, my school friends used to tell me my sandwiches were like works of art. I could never finish my lunch during school so I tended to save it for afterschool. I literally fed a school friend throughout HS w/ my leftovers.)

Usually Thanksgiving & Christmas dinners were just any normal Korean dinners... Like in elementary school when they would make you write an essay about your holiday dinner, I would not only have to write what we ate but explain what it was (For Thanksgiving, we had steamed white rice, seasoned dried anchovies, seasoned dried seaweed sheets, spicy fermented pickled cabbage, and fermented soybean soup with tofu - YUM)... At first my mom scoffed at the idea of making a special dinner for those days - what was wrong with the usual? And who in their right mind would pass on Korean food to have some Western food? Somehow my mother changed her tune when I was in jr. high - she was in cahoots with her best friend. They formed a plan that every year they would each host one of the holiday dinners i.e. if we did Thanksgiving they would do Christmas and vice versa. We started out alternating who would "open" with Thanksgiving but after a few years of trying to remember who started the previous year it was decided that the Kim's would host Thanksgiving dinner and the Jo's would host Christmas dinner. My mother was an expert in Korean cooking, American cooking not so much. Mashed potatoes were always from scratch (yay!), but the gravy was always from packets of weird brown powder (boo!). At first cranberry sauce came from a jar (boo! but strangely, I still loved it) until I learned how to make it from scratch (yay!). Stuffing was always Stove Top (boo!) but we always overloaded it with extra veggies (yay!). Now the turkey... the turkey is my mother's nemesis (like the cartoons that would show the roasted bird sparring with Bugs Bunny or whoever). Try as she might the turkey always came out overcooked. We would brine it, wrap it in bacon, wrap it in an oven safe bag, whatever my mom tried the turkey ALWAYS came out dry. (I think that's why I don't really like turkey.) That little plastic pop-up nipple thing? USELESS. The Butterball emergency hotline? I could never stay on the phone long enough b/c my mom would be telling me to do 5 different things RIGHT NOW. simultaneously. One year my sister tried to convince my mom that we should try deep frying a turkey. My mom was all for a new way to make turkey until she heard the words "deep fry" (she's a crazy health nut nowadays). I watched a few youtube clips of deep fry turkey failures & I told my sister over my dead body were we gonna deep fry one. (Although secretly I want to try it just for the sake of trying it.) Someday Mr. Tom Turkey, your time will come...

My best friend & I have known each other for 20 years. We've always been friends but we didn't become very close until after college - cooking made us closer. I'm not kidding. Her mom makes phenomenal Korean food. Our moms would always get together & share seafood pancakes, homemade ttuk, homemade fermented soybean paste... In fact, the last visit back to NJ/NY I had a chance to go to her parents' house for dinner & I came back to CA with some goodies from best friend's mom.

Cooking in the kitchen has brought us closer together as mother & daughter. We talk about everything while we cook - it's OUR time. We spend so much time together in the kitchen that there are times that I can anticipate what she wants done next or which platter she needs for a certain food. The moms who come over for dinner parties at our house watch our little ballet. She says "Umi-yah..." and I hand her a platter. Then she says "Will you..." and I stir whatever's boiling away on the stove. She says "Go get the..." and I make sure the plates & eating utensils are where they need to be. The ladies ask how can I tell what my mom's asking for when my mom doesn't even complete the sentence or describes something in a really obscure way. I just shrug & say "years of practice" - literally.

Anyhow, nowadays my mom gives me more & more slack in terms of cooking at home. She still hovers though, clicks her tongue if I'm not doing something her way... Holiday dinners are mainly my responsibility especially now that we are here in CA. I tell her to just sit back & relax. I tell my dad that he has to do the dishes.

When I cook, I search foodblogs & find recipes I like but I never follow them. Life is too short to stress over whether you did step 5 correctly or not. I don't measure anything - I eyeball. My mom doesn't really know how to tell me measurements of something... She tells me 1/2 a handful of this, make sure the water is up to there, taste it & then add more of this if you need it. Once I called her while I was away at college asking her how to make jangjorim (braised beef) and I had to laugh when she was telling me the proportion of soy sauce:water... So I googled - it didn't turn out as good as my mom's.

So to my mother, thank you for the lessons of domestication that will hopefully make my future mother-in-law happy that you didn't raise a slacker (a running joke with my mom). I'm not Julia Child but I can manage - thanks to you & your hovering *cough* I mean guidance. Thank you for putting up with my lazy shortcuts & still eating my food even if it was a FAIL. Thank you for teaching me to wash lettuce 20 times but if it's all the same I'll just rinse it a couple times & save myself on the water bills. Thanks mommy for teaching me the love of cooking.