안녕, it’s Ari, your talkative Korean friend and weekend reminder. 🎉 After a long break, I’ve finally brought back a food recipe and a mini Korean lesson, though I’ll be skipping news today due to time constraints. My new Korean lesson will start in February. Please look forward to it. Let’s start today’s newsletter!
A Soup New Yorkers Fell in Love With
The New York Times recently introduced Korean pork soup, dwaeji gomtang, as one of the top 8 dishes in New York City for 2023. The dish is served at Okdongsik, a Korean restaurant. According to the NYT, the food "is the kind of soup you could eat every day. But it’s especially welcome on those days when you get some news you were hoping wouldn't come." The good news is that you don’t have to be a New Yorker to taste this delicious Korean soup. You can super-easily make it at home with the following recipe that I found on YouTube (The recipe starts at 1:48:31, no Engsub). The key to making great gomtang is to use beef and pork together when making the broth. Here’s the recipe:
For 2-3 servings,
Prepare beef sirloin (300g) and pork picnic (uncooked, 300g) and poke them several times with a fork.
In 2L of boiling water, add meat, and 30 peppercorns, then boil for about 1 hour. (Cover and simmer over medium heat.)
Remove the meat from the broth, let it cool, and slice it as thinly as possible.
Put the sliced meat back in the broth and simmer gently for 10 minutes over low heat.
Make the dipping sauce for the meat with 1 tablespoon sugar, 2 tablespoons broth, 2 tablespoons soy sauce, 2 tablespoons vinegar, 1 tablespoon mustard, and chopped green onions.
Serve the meat and broth in a bowl along with the sauce. Bon appétit!
Mini Korean Lesson: I Will Carry Him on My Back
A Korean comedian's Instagram post recently went viral. He shared a photo 👆 of himself being carried on the back of his sister, who looks happy and is holding many shopping bags of luxury brands. In the caption, he said, "나 혼자 걸을 수 있어 누나," meaning "I can walk, sister." You might already understand why this photo is hilarious, but learning the following Korean expression will help you grasp it better.
업고 다니다
to carry someone on one's back (literally)
to cherish someone deeply (figuratively)
So when do you use this expression? For example, if you have a friend whose sister is sweet and kind, always taking good care of your friend and buying many gifts. She’s the kind of sister everyone would want to have. Then you can say to your friend:
"걔가 내 동생이면 내가 업고 다니겠다." (If she were my sister, I would carry her on my back.)
It doesn't mean that you will actually carry her on your back. It just means that you will cherish her deeply. Now that we've learned the expression, you can understand why the comedian's photo is hilarious; his sister seems so happy to have a brother who buys all the luxury goods for her that she really is "carrying him on her back."
P.S. It doesn’t have to be about a brother or sister. It can be about a husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend or just anyone.
Thanks for reading! If you liked my newsletter, ☕️ buy me a coffee ☕️ to support my work. It’ll help me keep writing! I will be back next week. 안녕!
That phrase is so fun! I'm definitely going to practice using it in writing, 고맙습니다 아리 씨!
Hello Again Ari, my second comment after now reading quite a few of your weekly letters.
So many possible ones to reply to, so settled on food and music plus a a few comments.
This recipe looks great, but Australia, oddly for a place that raises so much livestock for meat, seems to have fewer and fewer artisan butchers(to find the pork cut). So I while give it a go soon.
Like your self challenge re freestyle rapping in engish. You may not know that Aus is home to a lot of pretty decent rap and hip hop, for a long while like urban white, The Hilltop Hoods, a lot of First Nations(Indigenous), like Briggs and others, quite a lot of Aussies of African descent ( like Tkay Maidza and Sampa the Great), and our two most successful in US, Iggy Azalea and more recently The Kid Laroi, who is a First Nations young man. If you can't locate let me know.
And finally your written english is not too bad (in Aus speak that means pretty good).
So thankyou for all the interesting future reads.