There are some many things people take for granted.  Shelter, transportation and food.  With food, if you need something to prepare a meal you simply go to the store and buy it.  So what happens when you are in a completely foreign country and have yet to learn anything more than ‘hello/goodbye’?

After my hot dog experience with Kraft Dinner, I decided that using the extra hot dogs in spaghetti would be a bad idea I immediately thought of ground beef.  Great, so I’ve decided what to get…..now how do I get it?

A lot of english words are made more difficult by the Koreans adding a vowel at the end of a word that ends with a consonant.  For example ‘finish’ becomes ‘finishee’.  It is slightly less odd when a word like ‘village’ gets turned into ‘villagee’, which at least makes more sense by trying to pronounce a letter that is there but subdued when vocalized in english.  So I toyed with the idea of trying to make ground beef sound foreign by waling over to the store and asked for ‘groundee beefee’ but I just couldn’t bring myself to sound that dumb.

Being the geek that I am, I went to the tools I knew best….the Internet.  Specifically I used Babelfish.  Some of you might wonder why I didn’t use Google Translate, being a bit of a Google Fan.  Well, Babelfish has a bit of a geek history so there is a fondness for using something related to HHGTTG.

So I simply typed in ‘ground beef’ and choose to translate it to Korean and I’ll simply write it out to bring with me.  In case you haven’t seen the Korean written language (called Hangul), it’s related to Chinese/Japanese.  A lot of lines and slashes and circles arranged in some sort of order.  I was kinda hoping it wasn’t an overly complicated bunch of lines that I would be able to easily copy and bring with me.  Turns out I was right.

So, armed with this, I headed over to the store.  First I decided to just look for it.  Ground beef is pretty easy to find.  I found nothing.  Ok, time to whip out the note.  I held it up to one lady and said ‘ground beef?’, opting for standard english.  She said ‘yeh’ (which is yes….oddly, so is ‘neh’…I think it’s kinda like yes and yeah….) and then she proceeded to look for it.  She couldn’t find it and directed me to another lady behind the meat counter.  She said she had it (well, in Korean but I got the meaning) and finished with her current customer.

Well, what she did was get some beef out from the big freezer behind her and cut off some pieces.  She was going to grind it right there.  I asked her to do a bit bigger/more beef.  She ground it up and handed me the bag.

I brought it to the cashier, paid the 8130KRW (about $8) for 328grams (I think??  Not sure if I’m reading the package right).  Probably the most expensive beef I ever bought but at least I can say I did it all on my own and now can make some food with better meat for dinner for us tonight.

You all might be wondering what the heck could I possible write about that would ever be interesting about KD. Let me tell you.

While packing my house prior to my move, I was going through food and seeing what I can donate/use prior. Now, Korea doesn’t have everything Canada has, for obvious reasons. You can get many things but they tend to be way over inflated due to import costs. I had heard that KD was like $5 per box. Well, I had one box left and decided to take it with me.

I had told Bharati to get some hotdogs to go in the KD. She did and I think she got them during a Costco run. The package was some sort of ‘double-pack’, meaning two packages of 5 hotdogs each. I opened the ‘outer packaging’ and removed one of the sealed 5-packs. I turned on a frying pan to cook them up a bit while making the KD. I kept turning them over to keep them from burning on one side and trying to get them slightly brown. No real need to cook them as the mean is cooked prior to getting to the stores but extra cooking ensures safe eating.

Ok, so now the KD is all done, the butter, milk and cheese mixture all combined.  Now to cut the hotdogs down to size.  Uh oh….no sharp knife.  Well, a butter knife should do.  Wait….this skin is rather tough and not cutting very well.  Sigh, well I hate to do it but I use my pocket knife (after I thoroughly cleaned it of course!).  It cuts but still a little tough….and what’s that skin peeling up?  It looks transparent…..oh my god, the dogs are individually sealed as well!!!

Dammit.

Well, now comes the fun of getting the plastic coating off and seeing if any of it still stuck to the dog after being slightly burnt in the frying pan.  Luckily most of it came off but rather tough trying to peel hot hot dogs.

Ok, finally all cut up, have a quick taste.  Hmm….not anything to write home about, maybe even something to try to avoid in the future.  Find some other brand from the Army Base or such net time I think.

A good dump into the KD pot and mix it all up.  Put some into a bowl and add ketchup.  The ketchup almost balances out the not-so-great hotdogs……almost.

Down it all with a 580KRW ($0.58) 250ml can of Coke and it was at least a meal that will keep me alive, if over preserved.