Around the (foody) blogosphere

What I wanted to eat for lunch today: Kimchi Chige.

What I actually ate: toast, a poached egg and sardines.

We only had a fresh batch of kimchi in the house, and my friends, let me tell you, fresh kimchi, chige it not make.  For those who are confused, kimchi is a Korean staple that finds itself appearing at every single meal (pizza, noodles, chocolate cake? bring out the kimchi!- ok, except the cake part) - it bascially refers to any spicy fermented vegetable dish (although the vegetable is usually chinese cabbage or radish).  Chige is a cross between a soup and stew- thus Kimchi Chige is a soup/stew of kimchi.  Sounds delicious, I know. 

In any case, I had a huge craving for either this awesomely smelly soup or its close cousin Bude Chige (pronounced ‘Boo Deh’ ‘Chi Geh’) which is essentially kimchi chige with the added genuis of spam, sausage and noodles or rice cake.  Believe me when I say kimchi and spam are delicious partners, something about the spicy soup transforms the spam to actually give it depth- and that fatty spamness gives the soup extra flavour.  This all sounds gross, but it is amazingly good.  I do however, remember reading a review of a Korean restaurant in Epicure that completely missed the point of kimchi chige, claiming scepticism at having an entire dish revolve around an ingredient like kimchi.  I personally thought the name of the dish made it fairly obvious what was being celebrated here- if you prefer kimchi in small doses, why order a meal around it? 

That said, this review brought into sharp focus the nature of these things, which is as much as they (reviewers) and we may not like to consider it, reviews are highly tenuous, biased accounts that rely on what flavours we’re accustomed to eating, how much experience we’ve had of a particular kind of cuisine etc.  The function of the review is thereby not in actuality about making judgements on a meal’s/album’s/book’s intrinsic value, but rather its likely acceptableness to a particularized audience.  Thus a restaurant review in The Age is unlikely to be as of use in say, Seoul, where tastes and trends are different from those in Melbourne.  Similarly reviews of the best McDonalds in Australia is useful and pertinent to one group of people, but completely insignificant to another.  I don’t think these things can come down to a ’good’ ’bad’ dichotomy- because as I’ve harped on before in relation to culture, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are assigned according to a hierarchy of prescribed, generally western middle-upper class, tastes (although admittedly, food is a harder area to argue this, given that some things will always be ’bad’- for example, shit, and other things always ‘good’- i.e. chococlate).  It’s for these reasons that I can’t stand the term ‘bad taste’ (although, this doesn’t stop me from using it), it is inherently a political statement, and a confused one at that.  I have a three month old post lying around on the politics of taste- one day I may actually post it. 

This is not to say I find restaurant reviews distasteful- out of all kinds of reviews I like food reviews best.  My main point is simply that it is easy to forget that reviews are opinions and not facts, plus I am in a ranty kind of mood.  In any case, rant over, this post was actually supposed to be filled with links to food blog posts that I’ve been reading, so that you can enjoy them also. 

Kitchen Wench made me jealous with green tea and black sesame macaroons.

Kitchen Hand made me laugh with possibly the funniest robbery in recent history and, reminded me that we should all go and eat chocolate together soon.

Michael and Cindy made me want to make myself a really cute apron.

Ed from Tomato made me want to eat food from a glass straw.

Also, I want to be rich in minerals, like Lucy.

Finally: yummy yummy soup.

Ok that is all people.  Now go away (and come back another time).