Dining fun for one in South Korea

To the editor:
    Winter has now settled in to the Sun Chang Valley. In the morning, you see the thin streams of chimney smoke snaking up through the sky until they meet the layer of cooled air near the mountain tops. The fields are covered in the frost and ice of early winter. The first time you see this you think of the snow that is to come. Nothing like the fiffteen feet blown by the wind but still enough to help you realize that winter has come for a visit.     Each area has its own rhythm and goals. For students here in Korea, the idea of school schedules beginning in the fall is an anomaly. Their school year begins in March and goes until December. The schools are expected to provide 205 days of education for each student and this means that there are Saturday classes. Our last one was held on the 21st. I introduced the students to the treat of strawberries and chocolate. The intense use of greenhouses and a variety of micro-climates in South Asia mean that it is possible to have strawberries and other warm season fruits like watermelon on a truly out-of-season basis. While most of the land is devoted to rice, there is a gradual expansion of the products grown on the land that are not rice.
    Kim chi is the Korean national dish. Cabbages, white radishes, salt, red peppers, and time are the ingredients. The cabbage varieties used here are not the round globes that we know from our own gardens back home. Instead, they are the elongated forms we know as bok choy. I have not had the privilege of watching as they make kim chi as it has only begun. But the stacks of cabbages and radishes waiting to be processed are enormous.
    One does not sit down to a big bowl of the stuff. Rather you take a small amount and mix it in with the rice and other vegetables of your meal. The salt and pepper are potent in their flavor and will cover the blandness of the rice. Wrapping a leaf of cabbage around the rice using chopsticks is a true art. My colleagues are amazed that I am functional in language of chop sticks. When you are hungry enough anything that gets food into your mouth is good.
    A Korean dinner is a big affair. Your table is covered with lots and lots of small dishes with a variety of morsels of temptation. There are slices of garlic, shredded beans, nibble shrimp, and chicken pieces. Unlike the table in the U.S., the Koreans have many more meats with their meal. The key difference is that the amount of meat is in very small pieces so while you have a lot of bowls, there actually is only a little bit of meat from each animal. A civil table is one that has a large variety of dishes. You should not be able to see the wood grain. Tables are low to the ground. Part of this is due to the fact that the forests have been heavily harvested for hundreds of years.
    You are given a cushion and you fold yourself up so that your sitting down at the table and getting ready to enjoy. I am in most cases twice the size of my hosts. I do not bend as easily as I used to. It is an interesting experience. More on that later. For now though it’s back to the food at hand. They just brought in the central dish and it looks good — sliced pork and plums. Have a great Thanksgiving.