I was looking forward to being a student again. The thought of rising at 2pm on a Sunday, going to the shop for a tuna sandwich and 4 cans of Strongbow and then settling down on the sofa for a day of Pro Evolution Soccer seemed an attractive one, especially because at no stage in that process did I envisage taking off my dressing gown. The reality isn't quite matching up to the dream at the moment. Turns out that a 40 hour week and an MA is quite a lot of work.
Given the amount of work I did at undergraduate level, I feel reasonably sure that I could have managed a 60 hour week, my degree and still managed to establish Bolton as the dominant power in European football. However, my MA requires me to do things completely alien to me like order journal articles from Japan, keep proper bibliographic notes and read things outside of those which I'm expressly commanded to read by my tutors.
This Sunday morning I rose at 10am (after a luxury lie-in having stayed up to watch West Ham's annual charity drive for Bolton's ailing goal difference) and after a quick breakfast and shower set to work reading about the theories underpinning communicative language teaching (Canale & Swain 1980). I stopped at 12 and caught the bus to Gangneung to purchase some knee supports, dental flossers and a jar of olives. I read Jeremy Harmer's Practice of English Language Teaching (2007) on the bus here and back. Then I got home and went back to work until 5, when I stopped and spent a couple of hours cleaning my apartment, during which I even used two different hoover attachments. I felt a bit studenty using window cleaner in lieu of furniture polish, but not nearly as much as I felt simply old. I hadn't even finished work either; take me back to Exeter.
All this work doesn't leave much time for having fun, so I don't have much in the way of photos of exciting stuff in Korea. I would have some cool shots of penguins and Linda feeding an otter, if I'd remembered to take my camera to Sea World with me last weekend, but I didn't. It also doesn't leave much time for cooking, so in a new feature I present Cooking With Grev #1: 10 minute Mandu-guk.
Mandu is the Korean word for dumpling. They're not so different from either Japanese or Chinese dumplings really, though Korea tends to fry less and steam more (healthy). Guk is one of many seemingly interchangeable words for soup. Mandu-guk is the cheap and warming lunch that gets people through the Arctic winter in my part of Korea. If you want to know how to make it properly, I suggest looking at Maangchi's excellent Korean cooking site. Here though, is the ten minute "student" version.
You will need:2 cups water
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp sesame oil
1 tbsp Korean beef stock powder
Salt & pepper
1 tbsp sesame seeds
6 largish frozen dumplings
Handful of sliced rice cakes
Handful of roughly chopped green / spring onions
1 egg
2 small sheets of seaweed
Steps1. Add the water, sesame oil and soy sauce to a pan, and bring to a boil.
2. Add the beef stock, rice cakes and dumplings, plus a good slug of pepper. Boil for 5 minutes. While this is happening, chop the onions (if you haven't already) and beat the egg.
3. Add the sesame seeds and the onions, and boil for a further minute.
4. Take off the heat and then add the beaten egg. Stir gently otherwise it attaches itself to the bottom of the pan.
5. It should look something like this.
6. Pour into a large bowl, and crumble the seaweed over the top. That's it. Serve with kimchi and a saucer of soy sauce for mandu dipping.
There we go. I don't know whether there will ever be another cooking with Grev, but at least you know I'm not starving to death out here now.Until next time...
A
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