The Dinner Party!

Thursday night we had our big Korean Dinner party. Apparently this is a pretty traditional "welcome to your new home" affair and as a housewarming gift they usually bring things like TP and dishwashing soap. (!) As you can see we are now set up for TP for the duration of our time in Korea. 

I decided to cook stuffed peppers because they look more impressive than they actually are and they're impossible to screw up. We talked about making Salmon but my new oven is Gas, and different than what I am used to AND shows the temps in Celcius so it was too many new variables. Gotta go with easy right?

So I made stuffed peppers and a salad and the first people to arrive brought a dish with jellied something in the middle and strips of things all around it:

The green was cucumber, the red was some meat the bright red was crab (?) and the white and yellow were strips of egg whites and yolks. Then the next people brought cookies, the next people brought cookies, the next people brought flowers and the next people brought cake! I was starting to freak out at this point that we were going to have stuffed peppers, salad, and the Aztec sun dish of whatever it is for all those people. Thankfully, the last 2 to arrive were the head dudes and they brought TONS of food so we had way too much in the end:

You can see a pot of rice, and then left to right across the bottom a glass noodle dish, a tray of Korean Pancake (DELISH!! no really, I loved it...) white Kimchee, red Kimchee, and some cool pocket things filled with rice and beans. It was all really good.

Check out how the Aztec dish is all scrambled up. Right before he served it the guy that brought it asked me for (I thought) an oven mit. What he was actually asking me for was a "mixing glove". I was like "no dude, I don't have a mixing glove". I guess that's kind of a Korean kitchen staple. They COULD have brought me one and held back a little on the TP but whatever. Anyway, this guy had to use a plastic bag and mix his dish all up. He also poured a garlic sauce all over the top of it. Turns out the gelatinous mass in the middle was Jelly Fish. Live the adventure!

 

Here's Jeff kind of giving a "thanks for welcoming us to your country" speech before we all got down to dishing out food.

And then we got some food for the kids since they were STARVING since it was like 7:30 at night.

 

Here's a bunch of us eating in the living room. We had some music playing and so the picture tiles were going on the TV and they were pretty fascinated by our pictures so we gave them a little slide show about OR, RI, NC, and TX and all those other place we frequent.

 

The kids were awesome and just kind of hung out the whole evening.

Then we had dessert. We had all those treats that they brought and an apple pie from Costco which was a HUGE hit. I loved the fact that they could all get through an apple pie with chopsticks. Mad skills my friends...

 

So that was it! The night was a big success, we cleaned up the big mess and I now have a lovely week ahead of me with no events to plan for so that's awesome. And the leftovers were actually great and not as marginal as I expected them to be. Well, almost all the leftovers anyway. Jellyfish anyone?