Cooking!

So, I've written a lot about what I've eaten in restaurants, but very little on what I cook for myself at home.  Here's a breakdown.  For breakfast, I usually eat yogurt (sometimes Yoplait!) and sometimes fruit, lately kiwi, but also peaches or apples.  For lunch I eat at school every day and for the most part, lunches are good.  I think they're still new and exciting to me so I'm still more than willing to try most everything, though sometimes the smell of the cafeteria takes a little courage!  (I'm still getting used to how some things smell here...)  For dinner, and lunch on the weekend days that I hang in my apartment, I cook for myself.  Cooking here has to be a little creative because of the availability of ingredients.  Non-Korean ingredients are really expensive!  I paid something like $8 for a honey bear the other day!  So, lots of fried rice with vegetables and random crab or fish cake concoctions, stir fried vegetables (currently, I'm obsessed with sweet potatoes and carrots, though not together!), tofu, and my favorite: gimbap! 

The ingredients...minus the rice of course!

I've put some crazy stuff in my gimbap, but today I played it more traditional.  These ingredients are similar to what the woman in the shop downstairs makes.  That shop has almost become my personal Cheers! because whenever I go in there, there are inevitably four tables of my students calling my name and saying hello and the woman knows my order without me saying a word...it's pretty sweet!  But, now that I eat meat, I would like to add ham to my "usual" but I don't really know how to say it...one day I'll learn... or gesture in such a way that she understands what I mean...  So, she makes hers with ham, imitation crab, cucumber, pickled radish and fried egg.  Tonight, I was too lazy to fry an egg, so I used a carrot instead.  So, pictured above is imitation crab, carrot, cucumber and pickled radish.  Then I wrap all of those ingredients in a sheet of seaweed that is lined with white rice from my handy dandy rice cooker!   Here's a pretty rough video of me making it:  (I don't know why, but my camera cuts out some of the things I say to narrate what I'm doing, so the words are kind of jumbled...sorry!)

This was my first time using imitation crab and in the process of preparing the ingredients, I made a delightful discovery!  The package of imitation crab I bought last week was HUGE, so I was unsure of how it was going to work to freeze the rest in the same package.  Upon opening the enormous package of imitation crab, I discovered that each spear of crab is...  individually wrapped!  So, since I only used two spears, I literally have 38 string cheese size spears of imitation crab sitting in my freezer door.  This is what my freezer looks like at present:

It's like I hit the crab lotto!