This weekend was also too much rainy for our original plan. So once again we postponed our trip and found an emergency plan. We drove to the west, near the sea, where we went shopping in another traditional market. I saw another bunch of very strange things to eat. Dead or not. And the biggest amount of ginseng I have seen at once so far.
We then proceeded to our main goal, which I was unaware of, as usual. Driving in countryside, we soon stopped by a house surrounded by chicken. Luna’s mother went to talk with a woman, apparently the place owner. After a while, the woman went back to the house and came out with a knife. She then walked to the chicken, grabbed one, walk to the other side of the garden and without further notice sliced open the chicken in front of me. Had I understood Korean, I would probably have not been too surprised, but in my situation it came a bit out of the blue. The women repeated the process, killing another chicken.
The two chicken were then throw in a kind of wash machine to pluck the feathers off. And finally the woman gut them. All this happened with her grand kids wandering around. It reminded me the freshly dead pig I saw being cleanup with a spoon in my very early childhood. Strange how some unimportant events can be remembered for such a long time. I guess the bottom line is: don’t show the following video to your kids if you don’t want them to get gore flashbacks twenty years from now.
To sum up the week-end, my Korean mother cooked Samgyetang for my birthday. This kind of chicken soup got one of my favorite Korean meal over the last few months. But don’t be fooled, the main dish here is not the chicken, but the ginseng. The good part is it’s actually easy to cook. Whereas Korean kitchen is all about peeling, cutting and slicing for hours, this particular meal is the throw-all-in-the-pot-and-cook type, which honestly suits better my style of cooking. So I regulary cook a very basic version of it for the inconvenience of Luna who probably would prefer more variety in my cooking.
Pro-tip: when visiting your future step family, be sure to finish the (expensive) roots and most of the soup. Then you may eat chicken and rice if you’re not full yet, but these one really don’t matter that much.
