Korean cooking and the doghouse.

Tomorrow morning I'm off to the markets early to do my best to attempt to make 경단 (kyeongdan -- sweet rice balls with red bean filling) for the first time. In my experience making Korean food, locating and identifying all the unfamiliar ingredients without being able to produce the Korean words for them is always the most difficult part. Which is why I'm starting prep tonight, trying to find all the vocabulary I might need. Once you're out in the markets, you're there, and if at the end, you can't find one key ingredient, you're basically screwed. Which is why I can't be bothered trying this too often without assistance.

I've also had it in my head for quite a while now -- almost a year, in fact -- to figure out how to make a particular breakfast soup we had when I spent a few nights on a farm in the south last year for Buddha's birthday. The reason is that I can smell the same soup coming up from the apartment below mine when I'm getting ready in the mornings, but I have no idea what it was, and haven't thus far encountered it in a restaurant. It must be fairly common home cooking fare, and I know one of the main ingredients are those silvery agaric mushrooms, as that was the farm's main crop at the time of my visit. If anyone has any idea what this soup might have been, the name or a recipe, I'd be much obliged to be handed over that information.

In other news, Smalltown's in the doghouse big time. I reckon he knows it, too. I've put up with this girlfriend nonsense with a detached sense of amusement for a long while now, but enough really is quite enough. And not responding to my texts when we have tentative plans because you don't want to admit that you have to cancel them because your girlfriend is making you because she's petty and jealous in my books qualifies as "enough". Smalltown and I have never had even a small or momentary disagreement before, save for a few of his epic alcohol-induced rage blackouts (which I, by the way, never held against him, even while they were happening), so I'm not quite sure how this will all play itself out. I'm usually overly understanding of significant other related issues, because I generally just give up trying to understand it, given that my version of a "healthy" "relationship" seems to be quite off from most people's, but once you've been banned and someone's decided to just go along with that... well, I don't really know what else to do. So I guess we'll see.