A side effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, which I’m sure is the same for me as for others, is the amount of cooking we have been doing. We’ve always branched out of the foods we are familiar with, which over the years has brought us to eating things such as grasshopper, horse, donkey, veal nerve, duck tongue, bullfrog, javelina, pig eyes, brains, and ears, and most recently a Cajun Turducken.

Back in June, I made our first bowls of kimchi sundubu-jjigae and we fell in love with it. How in love with it? We just finished our second pound of gochugaru chili powder. At the base of this hearty Korean stew lies sundubu paste and that paste relies on a large amount of chili powder. I wasn’t very discriminating the first time I bought gochugaru; I went to a nearby Asian store and grabbed what I thought was “the real thing.” Getting back from vacation this week, I needed to make a fresh batch of sundubu paste which required me to revisit the YouTube video that got all of this going. I knew I would be finishing an opened bag of chili powder (our second bag this year), but I was prepared as I’d bought another bag at H-Mart some time ago just for this moment.

Watching the video the guy suggested going through the trouble of getting “real” Korean gochugaru. I thought I had the real thing as it had Korean writing on the package, so what else could it have been? It could be from China which was exactly what I saw on the older package and the new one I just opened. I consulted Amazon to rectify this and found out that authentic Korean chili powder is not all that easy to obtain. When I did find it the price made me think twice. The new “Korean Origin” chili powder costs $30 a pound compared to $10 a pound for the Chinese stuff. I had to remind myself that Asians pack and price spices different than the American market and on checking out my local store with the name-brand stuff on offer I discovered that a pound of regular old ground chili costs between $20 and $55 a pound when bought in those small bottles.

So, obviously, I was making sundubu paste because we were looking forward to our first bowl of kimchi and tofu stew since getting back home. For that, I needed to head out to H-Mart to get the rest of the ingredients but this time I decided to also stock up on about a month’s supply of silken tofu. The tubes are 11oz each or 312g; I bought 10 of them which will let us make 5 portions each of sundubu-jjigae. Come to think about it, we’ve eaten more than 25 pounds of tofu during this last half of the year. I needed another quart of kimchi, our 4th this year which is probably 4 times more than we’ve bought in our first 50 years on Earth. While this may sound mundane, I bought some fresh American- and Chinese-grown shiitake mushrooms; they were sold out of Korean shiitakes. My local “American” grocery stores don’t carry fresh shiitakes. If you sense a bit of incredulity in that, you’d have heard it right. Yes, my cynicism sometimes has me feeling like the local stores only sell Wonder bread, peanut butter, hamburger, chicken, frozen pizza, Ragu pasta sauce, and 94 types of sugary breakfast cereal.

Regarding the sundubu-jjigae with the “fake” chili powder: It turned out great, and now, with about a pound of paste in the freezer, it’ll be a few weeks before I can make a new batch but when I do, I’ll be using Korean-grown gochugaru. Maybe I’ll blog again about our experiences with this fantastically umami stew once the new chili powder comes in but how much can one write about this stuff?

Oh, there’s a downside to this return to blogging about normal life, each new post moves down my masterpieces of eulogistic praise regarding our recent trip to Oregon. I sure would like to recommend that you take the 2 hours to read the 32,956 words of my screed, but short of that you could also just check out the wonderful photos. I can’t emphasize how much more interesting that other stuff is compared to writing about kimchi and tofu stew.