My mom invited us to come to H Mart for dinner on Saturday night. It’s something I love to do because it’s close, there’s lots to choose from, and it’s good. Now we did not eat in the H Mart but there is a food court above it. There’s good variety, including Korean, Japanese, and Korean/Chinese. I hadn’t eatn any Korean in awhile, so I opted for something very Korean – dolsot bibimbap. Bibimbap literally means mixed rice. It includes veggies and some meat mixed with rice and a spicy pepper paste (kochujang), and you just mix it together and eat. The dolsot part means it comes in a burning hot stone bowl, so that everything is hot, hot, hot when you eat it, and if you let your rice stick to the bowl, it will crisps up nicely into a burnt crunchy snack. You can make it as spicy as you want or not, by adjusting how much of the kochujang to put in. I like mine spicy! It also came with the obligatory kimchi (which was very bland) and a couple other banchan, plus some soup. The soup was quite good!

My mom opted for some seafood udon from the sushi place. She wanted something healthy. Z also opted from the sushi place, getting a couple of avocado and cucumber rolls and a shrimp tempura roll. They made it fresh for him, and it was all quite good. There’s a stall there called “Monsieur Tong Tong”, which makes “fried chicken” and certain other more fried dishes. They have an excellent Japanese tonkatsu. It’s HUGE and the sauce is quite good. And you get a bunch of side dishes. It’s definitely for sharing. At “Chew Young Roo” they have alot of dumplings and buns and specialize in Korean-Chinese noodle dishes, like champong (spicy seafood noodle soup) and chajangmyun (noodles in black bean sauce). I often pick something from them as well. It’s nothing to write home about, but it’s good for fast Korean food!

Friday was pizza day for lunch, but I was in a training class all day so they catered some sandwiches for us. They had one of my favorites, chicken salad on a croissant, and they also had some of the best grilled green beans I’d ever had. They were smoky, crunchy, and had a slightly asian-esque flavor. I wanted to eat the whole giant bowl! Speaking of eating the whole giant bowl, ESPN2 showed a bunch of reruns on professional eating competitions on Sunday. Sometimes, I dream of getting into competitive eating. Perhaps it’s something I’ll have to try out once in life. I’m just not sure what I would pick as the food of choice!

It was a lazy Saturday today, so after running a few errands around the neighborhood, I decided to go to H Mart. I have a few recipes I may try so I needed to pick up some ingredients. Now I live in a metropolitan area that has a large enough Asian population. We’re no Bay Area mind you, but we have plenty of representation. We have plenty of Korean representation as well. There are even a few pockets of Philadelphia and on the border of the city that could be considered pseudo-Koreatowns. Store signs are written in Korean, Korean restaurants abound, and there are a fair share of Korean food markets.

There used to be one big market in North Philadelphia and the rest were fairly smaller mom and pop shops. That’s until H Mart came into the picture. Some of you may know it as Han Ah Reum. Try figuring out how to pronounce that, my non-Korean friends. H Mart just rolls much more easily off the tongue. An H Mart moved into the neighborhood of that big market and has pretty much put it out of business. It also put out the businesses of most of the smaller mom and pop shops. There’s an H Mart in Upper Darby now, which lives where an old mom and pop shop used to be. While it is sad for the little guys, I can’t complain when the selection is better, the food is fresher, and the prices drastically cheaper.

The Upper Darby H Mart is where I visited today. It also happens to be the one Korean market that is patronized 50% by non-Koreans. Everyone has discovered the inexpensive and fresh produce there and the variety of international ingredients it carries. Now I’ve seen plenty at Asian markets, but I saw something there today that I never expected to see – a giant dead tuna staring at me in the eye. Yes, just sitting on a table. Next to it was a giant dead tuna fish head and packaged up containers of tuna. I suppose this was all to illustrate just how fresh the fish was. But seriously, if I was a little kid, I could have been seriously traumatized.

The last time I was this close to a giant tuna was on a deep-sea fishing trip off the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I myself had caught a mahi-mahi, but we’d also caught our share of yellowfin tuna. Once we got back to the marina, they cleaned up the fish and bagged it up. We drove back to our rental, made fresh tuna ceviche, and ate it up. It was one of the freshest things I’d ever eaten in my life. Talk about melt in your mouth sushi. Good times…

I’m a live to eat girl. I eat what I want, when I want, as much as I want. I don’t read nutritional information, I don’t follow portion sizes, I don’t stop eating just because I feel full. I’ve lucked out in the gene and metabolism categories, so for now, I’ll continue to gorge.

I didn’t always start out that way. Apparently, when I was little, I would never eat my mother’s cooking. And since that was my main source of food, I didn’t eat much. Everyone was worried I would stay scrawny and not ever grow. But take me out to eat or to a meal prepared by anyone other than my mother, and I ate like a sumo wrestler. Go figure.

Since I come from a Korean family, and perhaps it is an Asian thing, I grew up with most things in life revolving around food and eating. When eating breakfast, we would talk about what lunch would be. And same with lunch and what dinner would be. Every gathering was all about food. I suppose I was raised to be way too into food.

I started this blog to just jot down my constant thoughts about food. I may talk about what I ate on a particular day. Or I may review a restaurant. I may try out a new food item/product/gadget and muse upon it. If I cook something and it turns out well, I’ll share a recipe. Who knows? Let’s just roll with it. I’ll try to post pics too, but I can’t promise that this blog will be photo-heavy. I’ll try my darndest. And don’t poo-poo me if I occasionally go off on a non-food related topic. We all fall off the wagon sometimes.

When I had to come up with a name for this blog, I came up with foodzings. Which if I spelled it “correctly” should be foodsings, but then some confused soul may think I was referring to singing vegetables. My musings about food. Or better yet, my muzings about food, my foodzings. LET’S GRUB!