Asian Cooking in Guatemala

For a long time now, Karina and Jin (a teacher/neighbor originally from China) had been talking about getting a group together so Jin could teach us how to make a few Chinese dishes.  The day finally came this weekend.  
On Saturday morning, Karina, Jin, Karen, and I took off at 10:30am to go shopping for ingredients.


Our first stop was the Chinese store.  Watching Jin walk in, it was like watching a kid in a candy shop.  It was like she was home.  She was ecstatic to see all of the ingredients.  “Look how great those mushrooms look!”  “Ooh, with those noodles you could make…”  “This is my favorite brand of soy sauce!”  It was great, and just following her around was a lesson in Chinese cuisine, though I’ll remember none of it in the future.  
From there, we went to zone 7. By this time, we were getting hungry, so we went to Jin’s favorite Korean restaurant.  Pro tip: if you want the best service at a Korean restaurant in Guatemala City, take someone with you who can speak Korean and order in Korean.  It’s not a myth that they serve foreigners differently, according to Jin, who has it from the Korean parents at our school.  
Since we all have gotten Korean BBQ enough times to know what and how to order and eat that, Jin decided perhaps we should try something new, so we ordered a soup, which we cooked over a burner at our table, and that came with all the little side dishes that also come with the meat when you cook that.  Our meal was absolutely delicious, and we left stuffed.  


Last stop: the Korean store.  Jin picked up a couple of sauces, the cracked red pepper we would need for the kimchi, and a few other small things.  Again, it was fascinating to watch her in her element.  I would never go to the store on my own--even if I knew which ingredients I needed, everything is in Asian languages, and I wouldn’t know where to start.  
Back in La Joya, we started on the kimchi around 4pm.  Jin mixed together the marinade for the cabbage: a huge amount of red pepper flakes, rice porridge, green onions, garlic, ginger, and anchovy sauce.  
"That much red pepper?  Really?"


When that was done, we got out the cabbage (which had been salted hours earlier to drain out the water).  Jin showed us how to spread the paste on each layer, then wrap it up.  From there, the cabbages would go into an airtight container.  They’ll stay there for two weeks, fermenting, and when they’re smelling nice and ripe, we’ll be ready to eat them!  
After the kimchi was prepared and put away, we began on Chinese dumplings.  We mixed up the stuffing, which turned out to be the easy part.  Jin kept telling us dumplings would go quickly and easily, because we’d just have to wrap them.  We planned to make around 250 between the six of us.
Fun fact: Chinese dumplings are tricky little buggers.  
A few of us were used to making perogies (gloriously stretchy dough that you fill and pinch the edges together to seal), and some had made ravioli (pasta dough laid over a form, filled, and then pinched with a second layer of dough).  None of us were prepared for the intricate folding and sealing of the delicate dumpling wrappers.  

What the dumpling SHOULD
look like 
Most of our dumplings looked nowhere near as beautiful as Jin’s, and even the ones that we thought we’d done well on busted open when we boiled them.  While I tried to perfect the cute dumpling folding Jin had showed us, others got creative...trying out “tacos” and “empanadas” and cute little twisted packets.  We may have failed at dumpling making (and we called it a night after wrapping only 106 of them), but we certainly had fun and laughed a lot in our attempt.  And, while the dumplings split open and became waterlogged when we tried to boil them, they still tasted pretty darn good.  





For all those reasons--I definitely count our Saturday lesson in Asian cooking a success!   

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cambodia: Reflections and Highlights

Image
I was really excited to visit Cambodia for a few days and hit up Angkor Wat and the other temples in the area.  Cambodia felt like my kind of adventure--and I can’t even really say why.  But I was excited.  I was excited for our hotel there--a full-out boutique hotel (not a hostel), with AC, a swimming pool, breakfast included, and airport pick-up for free--which cost us a scant $20 per night.  And we’d read about a lot of great tours we could take with local guides.  Flying in and flying out, this leg of the trip would be a breeze, and hopefully everything would be as cheap as the hotel.   The Mango Rain Boutique Hotel Our flight to Cambodia was unlike any other I’ve ever been on.  There were only about 20 of us on the flight--which would not have been strange, except it was, because we were on a full-size plane that could have seated 200.  The 20 of us were mostly grouped together towards the back of the plane.  Second impressive thing was that as soon as the plane got to al
Read more

DI Globals 2016: A Tale of Two Teams

Image
For the past 3 years, I have acted as a team manager for Destination Imagination at my school in Guatemala, and each year, my team has earned a trip to Global Finals in Knoxville, Tennessee.  This school year, I was blessed to manage the exact same team I had last year—the Aguaguates, the most wonderful group of kids any DI team manager could wish for.  This group, all 7 th graders this year, has everything needed to not only excel at DI, but also make a team manager’s job almost unnecessary.  They have amazing team chemistry, and they understand the importance of teamwork.  They’re crazy creative and hilarious and amazing actors when they get on stage.  They push themselves to improve their performances.  They know what they need to get done for DI, and they create their own practice schedules.  In short, they are a DI dream team, not to mention really, really great people .  This year though, I took one look at the school calendar and decided that if the team qualified for Glob
Read more

Yearly Update: The Journey to 30

Image
Over a year has passed since my last “update.”  And the year I was 29, despite the fact that I lived close to home rather than abroad, was anything but boring, so there’s no real reason for the lack of blog posts.   The year I was 29, I survived what may have been my most difficult year of teaching yet.  Many overseas teachers say, “Teaching in the States is so much different than teaching abroad.  You’ll see.  That’s why I went overseas; I’d never go back to teaching in the States.  It’s just...too much.”  Well, they’re not wrong.  I admit, I thought that with five years teaching experience under my belt, my first year in the US, my first year at the high school level, would go rather smoothly.  While in a sense it did (no concerns about the quality of my work from administration or complaints from parents), it was mentally and emotionally very taxing.  Even this year, my 2nd back in the States, I’m still adjusting to and coming to terms with the fact that as a US teacher, I wil
Read more