Korean Food - Doesn't this look good!

What is this dish? It was served at a very nice restaurant and was one of several Korean style dishes at the meal. If you look closely, you will see cabbage--that is good. But then over the cabbage are nice looking squirts of mayonnaise and ketchup. Yup...a mayo and ketchup cabbage salad. Someone commented that it was a Korean attempt at American food. If that was the case, then someone needs some advice.


This is a photo of the rest of the food at the "mayo and ketchup" cabbage salad meal. I was on a university field trip for the international faculty and students. These girls were middle school kids and were the daughters of some of the Korean faculty.

I have been here now for just over a week. The first thing I remembered when I arrived was that I didn't really like Korean food. Their food typically consists of many small dishes of different types of things as you can see in the picture above. The problem I have is that these small dishes typically are VERY HOT and SPICY..... and pickled. I can eat hot and spicy food....but this stuff isn't hot--it is FIRE! For lunch today we had some type of pork in a red sauce. It looked very good. When I put a tiny piece of pork in my mouth the fire hit my mouth. I ended up putting 4 small pieces of the pork into the seaweed soup they also were serving. I then added lots of the white rice that appears at every meal. So...that was lunch--seaweed rice soup with a few tiny shards of pork.

Dinner tonight was soup--Koreans always have soup. But this time the soup was red and had lots of cabbage and hunks of sausage in it. It looked good. But again---the fire house hots hit my mouth the minute a few tiny drops were tasted. But the salvation tonight was a dish of corn, cabbage and canned tuna fish. I spooned lots of this over my white rice and mixed it up. That was dinner.... Needless to say, I went up to my room and had a few cookies, some watermelon and a banana. Fruit from the store seems to be my mainstay.

Am I losing weight? Probably not--and that is the sad thing. If I could cut the cookies and ice cream I might be able to shed a few pounds while I am here. Sigh....