If you’ve eaten korean food before, especially in a party type of setting or at someone’s house, you may have eaten japchae. It’s kind of an iconic korean dish, for whatever reason. I actually am not crazy about it, but when people want to expose newbies to korean food, japchae is often used, along with korean bbq. It’s typically a side dish or an accompanying dish made of potato starch noodles, veggies, and sometimes meat. It’s often served cold or lukewarm. It’s not a hot dish. It’s really up to you what kind of veggies you put in it. So here’s a version that my mom made so that W could learn how to make this.

This is not a difficult dish to make at all, but it is manually intensive. You need some decent knife skills, or at least it helps. And it also will look a lot more attractive if you’re very good at julienning. So here we go. Julienne some carrots into thin sticks. In a pan with some vegetable oil, sautee them up with a little salt. Take a thing of kamaboko and julienne that up too. Sautee it up with a little salt. These were some dried shitake mushrooms. Soak them so they spring back to life. Then remove the stems and julienne the tops. Sautee this with some oil and salt. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Thinly slice up some onions and sautee with oil and a little salt until soft. I think you’re probably catching on by now. Feel free to use other veggies you like. Spinach is often seen in most japchae variations. My mom doesn’t like to put spinach in there as she feels it makes it spoil faster. Thinly sliced red, yellow, or orange bell pepper would have been a nice touch. You can also put egg in here as well. Mix up an egg, cook it in a big pan like a thin pancake and slice it up into thin strips. Really, make your japchae to suit what you like.

Thinly cut up some sliced beef. These are slightly still frozen so it’s easier to cut. Cook the beef up with some oil and a little salt.

Here are the potato starch noodles. You know these are the right ones because it has a picture of japchae on the package. Then it has to be right, right?

Cook these up according to the directions. They don’t take long to cook. Thoroughly rinse the cooked noodles in cold water.

Yep, that’s right, you have to heat these up a little too. Add a little oil, a little salt, and heat these up a bit.

Throw everything into a big ass bowl and mix!

I said mix!

Add some soy, some sesame oil, and some sugar. Add little by little, and adjust to your liking while mixing and tasting. And really, that is it!

So while we roamed Bite of Bend and had a few snacks, towards late afternoon, we needed a proper meal and we needed to get out of the oppressive sun. So we headed for some sit down noodles at Soba. It’s a little mini-chain in the area. They sell various asian style dishes. You’re bound to find something that everybody likes. You can pick rice, noodles, soup, and whatever flavor you want and whichever protein happens to float your boat that day. J got the shrimp yakisoba because he wanted broccoli. It only came with two pieces of broccoli, but otherwise, he was happy with this. It was very mild.
I had the vietnamese chicken rice bowl. It was like a vermicelli bowl, except it was brown rice and the only veggie you got was lettuce. But it was essentially the same nuoc cham sauce. The chicken was perfectly grilled chicken breast and it was delicious. You get plenty of food for a small price. It’s nothing mindblowing, but it’s a nice, cheap, solid meal. You order at the counter and take a number, and then they bring the food out to you. The food came out fairly fast. If you’re not in the mood for pub grub or the really expensive fine dining options on the Bend downtown strip, give Soba a go.

For my vacation out to central oregon, I connected through SFO. I got a nice surprise when I was upgraded into first class for my PHL to SFO flight. As you can see by my outstretched stump legs and the inability of the bottoms of my flexed feet to actually touch the divider, first class does not really matter to me, at least not comfort wise. I only get excited for it because of the free food. I’ve been reading this book called “Near A Thousand Tables” which is about the history of food. I highly recommend it!

The dinner choices were chicken quesadillas or pasta with mushroom sauce. Since I don’t like mushrooms, I went with the quesadillas. These really weren’t very good at all. The quesadillas themselves were pretty bland and the tortillas had gotten crunchy. The pico de gallo was the worst part though. They absolutely tasted like nothing. Nothing at all. It did not taste like tomatoes nor did it taste like onions. It kind of defied logic. But the saving grace was the warm oatmeal raisin cookie. Seriously, this might have been one of the best cookies I’ve ever had in my life. And it was on a flight. The flight attendant said it was a good cookie, and damn he was beyond correct.

So our flight to Redmond/Bend, OR actually got cancelled. They gave us the runaround for a very long time and delayed the flight for hours and hours until they finally cancelled it right around midnight west coast time, saying they couldn’t find a first officer. When the cockpit deplaned, two pilots got off. They totally screwed us. But with that cancellation came a free hotel stay and free breakfast vouchers. At least we’d be full on our flight the next morning. The food options at SFO are pretty darn good, especially if you go to one of the main food areas in the United terminal. Since it is airport food prices, the $15 actually doesn’t get you very far. J got a shredded chicken salad.

I tried to go as luxurious as possible, even though it was breakfast, and ordered the nabe yaki seafood udon at a japanese joint. The one thing you can count on in san francisco is the ubiquity of japanese food joints, even at the airport. The broth was a little bit on the bland side, but it was still damn good as far as airport food goes. I’ll take this over a sbarro pizza slice, any day!