My dad's home made sweet potato fries.
Of course, I had to tell my parents that in my experience the sweet potatoes in Korea are usually baked and then eaten with nothing else on them--something that Canadian food culture would find 'foreign' as we usually put spices and sauces on a lot of the things we eat.My dad told me he put salt and pepper with some garlic powder on the sweet potatoes. They were pretty good but I'm still a fan of 'normal' potatoes.
The first time I was handed a baked sweet potato with nothing on it (as in butter and/or salt) I was standing in the teachers office at my middle school on Ganghwa Island. It was 8:30 in the morning and I probably looked at the Korean teacher handing me the baked sweet potato like they were on drugs or something, lol. I took it and tried a bit of it but the Canadian food culture/psychology of eating a baked sweet potato during the breakfast period of day was something I couldn't get past . . . so I told the teacher I'd "save it for later" . . .
Other foods I have a hard time eating during the breakfast time of day are kimchi and rice. I'll eat it now that I've been in Korea for years--but when I first arrived I just couldn't stomach the idea--literally--of eating something sour, bitter, and spicy for breakfast. Now it's not that big a deal but it really shows you how ingrained a person's native food culture can be when it comes to types of food and times of day. Whether or not one will eat kimchi as a part of their breakfast is a great test of how open minded a person is, I think, and I have to wonder if it would accurately predict how much trouble new foreign teachers will have as they adapt to Korean culture where they'll be living and working for an entire year. I suspect that it might have a pretty high degree of success in predicting who will adapt successfully and quickly, and who will have an 'interesting' time during their tour of duty, lol.
Anyways, time to go watch part III of Tim Burton's retelling of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
J
LOL - I remember the first time I came to Korea on semi-vacation. The first morning I was invited into the hotel room of my Korean friends where they had rice, kimchi, soup, and a few other oddities.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I couldn't believe that was supposed to be breakfast. ;-)
Totally used to it now..
I'm alright now with the whole Korean food for breakfast thing--but yeah, it took some time to bend my mind around the idea of kimchi for breakfast.
ReplyDeleteJ