Berlin by bike

So, we finally got our paper out last week, after a huge amount of discussion, confusion and a few months of calculations and so I treated myself to a long weekend...

I arrived back in Munich yesterday evening from a few days in Berlin seeing a couple of good friends from Santiago days (Konrad and Merlinda, with whom I traveled to South Africa and Mozambique as well as Beijing last year). I arrived home yesterday at about 6 in the evening and quickly cleaned up the remaining mess from Wednesday night's Korean dinner I'd cooked for 8 friends (from Korea, China, Taiwan, Bolivia and Germany). I'll add some details about the Korean meal soon I hope when I get a few photos through, but for now I'll just note that Maangchi saved the day with her amazing videos! Samgyetang was one of the new dishes I tried:

Having not had much more than a half hour's sleep in Berlin on Saturday night (details also to follow) I was in a pretty dazed state but had to pull myself together as I had five guests arriving last night - all couchsurfers. I restarted hosting in Munich a few weeks ago and things have been pretty hectic on that front. Last night the new arrivals were a Finnish woman and her son plus three Swedes who had been in Munich for the European Juggling Convention - something I would have loved to have joined had I been in the city. They were all pretty pooped having spent the last week in a tent, but gave me some good tips on five ball juggling which helped immediately - I've been struggling with five for the best part of ten years!

Anyway, I'll backtrack a bit now to the Berlin trip before these memories disappear in the current chaos (incidentally, today is a holiday here - helpfully translated by the waitress in the cafe as "Maria drives to heaven day").

Car sharing is big in Germany so I searched out a lift from Munich to Berlin on mitfahrgelegenheit and found myself heading North in a Mercedes van with six others. I was rather looking forward to the 600km trip, ready to meet some new people and possibly to practice some German, but when I tried making conversation with the woman I was sitting next to I was quickly cut-off as it was made clear that she'd rather we made the journey in silence (not with those words, but her tone was pretty clear). So we sat, three in the back of the van, in silence for the next 5 hours! Still, it was a nice chance to see some of the scenery through central Germany.

I arrived around lunchtime, was picked up by Merlinda and we headed to dump things back at the flat before heading on a walk around the city. I shan't go into the details of the gastonomic tour we went on over the next couple of days, but somehow we managed to fit in trips to eat Iranian, Ethiopean, Mexican, Turkish and Thai restaurants, throughout the city - all great and a few photos will follow.

After Konrad turned up the next morning from Sweden we scooted around the city on bikes, though there had been a little misunderstanding and I was on what felt like a child's bike so spent the whole time standing up on the pedals so as not to get cramps - anyway, away from the gym I was still able to get a decent workout.

We started the tour with a trip to the Martin Gropius-Bau museum to see the very extensive André Kertész exhibition, went via Alexanderplatz and the parliament building, check-point Charlie, the Holocaust memorial and a dozen other points in between, finally ending up in a cafe escaping from the deluge of rain which had rolled in quicky in the late afternoon. After the downpour had become a drizzle we got back on the bikes and headed to an Ethiopian restaurant where we guzzled exotic beers and munched away at a great meal of Injera and curries before heading back to the flat in the late evening, legs tired but having seen a good chunk of the city in a short time.

Here are some shots from the holocaust memorial, a very powerful piece indeed.

and a few from the rest of the day:

Woken at 6 the next day by the bright sunlight we had a hearty breakfast and headed out again into a much warmer, sunnier day than the previous had been. We made our way along the river for a while, stopping off at cafes and flea markets as thirst and interest deemed appropriate.

After a busy few hours cycling around, Konrad and I headed off to the Jewish museum while Merlinda went home to recover for a few hours.

I think that the Jewish museum deserves a post for itself, so I'll not write too much about it now, but at least I'll note that it's one of the most interesting, best designed museums I've ever visited.

After a good few hours in the museum we went for an excellent Turkish dinner before heading to a club for a night of Balkan beats. The likes of this:

The nightlife in Berlin feels completely different from that of Munich and it was great to have a good experience of the Berlin way of doing things before I headed back South. We had a good few hours of getting thoroughly exhausted, dancing into the early morning light, getting a sauna/aerobic workout combination in the process. Arriving back home at 5am via a currywurst we had about half an hour until being woken again by the sunlight.

The next/that day, exhausted and somewhat hungover I made my way back to Munich via another car-share - this time slightly more communicative than the previous, but still somewhat awkward. Arriving home, by 9 my flat was again full with two acrobats, a juggler, a Finnish speech therapist and a bioinformatics major.

This week I want to get a couple of projects well underway before heading off next week for a long summer break in the US. More updates to follow on the Jewish museum and the Korean meal when time allows...

Spare ribs, mock Korean style

On a bit of a recipe roll from yesterday, I thought I'd post up last night's meal with photos.

In Galicia churrasco (spare ribs) is one of the meaty alternatives to the fine seafood on offer, but I never much liked the way it was cooked - relatively quickly on a hot grill, which leaves it tough and a challenge to rip off the bone. I'm all for interesting textures in food (pure cartilage and extremely fatty cuts where two of the new textures that I grew accustomed to in China), but in the case of ribs I'm definitely in the long, slow cooking camp. I came up with the following recipe for spare ribs a year or so ago and have been trying to perfect the timing and heating ever since. Last night was a pretty good success.

The marinade is made of several parts, the first being the base sauce used to make kimchi and can be found here. I would recommend going the whole hog and making the kimchi while you're at it. I normally do enough of the sauce to fill a couple of big tupperware containers and then add it in generous quantities to most recipes for the following months. It seems to keep, in the fridge for at least three or four months without a problem - it may last longer but by that time it's already been used up in my place!

Take two or three generously heaped tablespoons full of the kimchi paste and to it add honey, soy sauce, gochujang, and I normally throw in another few chunks of garlic which caramelize on the ribs. I'll leave the ratios up to you, depending on how sweet or spicy you like it.

Take the ribs and rub in the sauce with your hands - they need to get a good massage to get the sauace everywhere. Then marinate them for a few hours in the paste (I'm still not sure how much the marinating does, given the time that they have in the oven anyway).

Heat the oven to around 80 degrees, wrap the ribs in silver foil securely so that the moisture can't escape and put them in the oven. I normally give them about 4 hours or so at 80 degrees and then for the last half hour I take them out of the silver foil turn the heat up to around 170 and get them caramelizing on the outside. Slow cooking them leaves them moist and tender, so you have to be careful not to dry them out in the last stage. By this time they should be falling off the bone. In fact, it may be better to do them for longer, at closer to 65 degrees, but this would probably bump the time up to more like six or seven hours which I can't usually spare.

This time I did them with garlic roast potatoes - I would normally add some rosemary and thyme to the potatoes but didn't have any fresh. The potatoes are boiled for around ten minutes, then bashed around violently in a pan to get the outside floury. Then coat them in a pan with a little butter and olive oil with salt, onions and garlic. The ideal is then to cook them on a high heat for about an hour and a half, but with the ribs cooking slowly I had to adapt a little and gave them a good 15 minutes extra at the end on around 200. The aubergine was stirfried, after salting, in a mixture of garlic, ginger, one red Birdseye chilli, a dash of soy sauce and fish sauce, an inch of lemongrass and a squeeze of lemon, all having been crushed in a pestle and mortar.

Slightly unfocused, but here was the final result.

A taste of Korea

So much to blog about from the last couple of weeks, but right now I'm recovering from a bought of something that hit me hard yesterday. I'm still not sure if it was food poisoning (the most likely option given some of the strange things I've been eating recently - including yukhoe (육회) and the biggest sea urchins I've ever seen) or a 24 hour virus, but yesterday morning it knocked me for six. Anyway, I made it into the CQUEST office this morning in Sogang university and had a reasonably productive day working on a couple of projects.

I only have a few days before leaving Korea and heading back to China for a week, and there are still a fair few friends I've got to catch up with before I head off but today I still need to rest up and make the most of the next couple of days in the office.

For now I leave you with a tour of some of the food in the market in Pohang and a few plates that have made the last two weeks so...well...tasty.

These and more can be found on my Flickr stream.

Kimchi blues

Spending a few weeks in Korea this summer gave me enough times to get completely addicted to kimchi, Korea's highly spiced pickled cabbage dish. Here in Santiago it's virtually impossible to find anything with a hint of heat, so I scouted around on the web and found a few recipes, the most explicit was in video form here. So, I bought the ingredients this week and spent a couple of hours this afternoon transforming this:

into this:

Now I just have to wait for 24 hours until it begins to ferment, and then fit the whole thing in the fridge. I'll be making kimchi mandu ASAP!