Medicinal Korean soup

With this crazy neverending polar vortex end-of-the-world weatherpocalypse, the absolute worst thing imaginable happened to me: I got sick.

I never catch colds. Until recently, I haven't been full-blown sick for over TWO YEARS. Closer to two and a half. I get very short-lasting and debilitating fevers once in awhile, what with the hypertension and all, but usually these are less than 24-hours. This time, I was laid up a week and still have a bit of a cough.

I am a huge baby when I get sick, like many, but luckily have been able to hide out at home and avoid embarrassing myself out in public like the last time I was sick when I caught some deathly bronchial infection from my niece, who was a baby then. She's a toddler now, for frame of time reference.

To survive, I made pots and pots of soup, which lasted me weeks because the feverish kind of sick I was always makes me lose my appetite. One of my favorites is this monster-vitamin-fest Korean soup that's both super easy and convenient. Cooking with Korean ingredients is a cinch because everything's either dried or frozen fresh and basically lasts forever. I mean, I don't really know how long things are going to last in the freezer, and I eat them usually when I'm sick, and I never get sick! So I'm still alive. Who are you going to believe?

MY MEDICINE SOUP STOCK

This may seem like a lot of ingredients, but for most of them, once you have them in your freezer/cupboards, you're set for years. It takes less than an hour and you can make smaller batches so they don't go bad when you get sick of it and have to order a cheeseburger on seamless.

2-4 quarts water
Dried anchovies (similar to these on amazon, they freeze and last forever)
Dried kombu/kelp seaweed (the hard square ones you get in ramen)
Dried shiitake mushrooms
Dried Korean seaweed (similar to this on koamart, I think you can use wakame too)

Soup soy sauce (on koamart – maybe regular can be used, but use way less)

Sesame oil

Garlic

Ginger

1. Start boiling the water. Take a handful the mushrooms and the squiggly seaweed each, and throw them in a bowl to soak. The squiggly seaweed doubles in size, but the mushrooms stay about their wrinkly selves.

2. Throw a few of the squares of kombu into the water, and a few of the anchovies. Because I'm squeamish, I pull off the heads and take out the little black guts part thats attached to them, so only the bodies go in, but I don't think that part's necessary.

3. By the time the water's boiling, the mushrooms and squiggly seaweed should be rehydrated. Dump their soaking water and throw them in the pot. Add sliced garlic and ginger (I hate ginger so I only put a couple slices, but it's supposed to be amazing for your immune system.)

4. Leave the soup for about 20-30 minutes at a medium boil, then add the soy and sesame oil. Also start to sea salt for taste. Should be pretty good by now.

You can eat it at this point, but I like to fish out the kombu and anchovies and add things like frozen rice cakes (the little round ones), whisked eggs, tofu, rice or noodles. You can also add any kinds of hot sauce and turn it into something else – kimchi soup, tofu soup, anything. Or you could make it completely vegan and leave out the anchovies/egg and it still tastes amazing. 

Her

I'd been on the fence about Her for a few reasons, the main one being that when testing the plot against the one sentence summary (man falls in love with his operating system), it honestly sounded not interesting to me as a premise, and also kind of ridiculous and cheap. The concept of how we "love"/depend on our technology too much has been debated to death and I was bored of that conversation. Or, so I thought!

If you haven't seen it, I would even recommend not watching the trailer or even listening to anyone else talk about it. I managed to avoid it through a combination of being sick and homebound for awhile, and went in with medium- to low expectations. I mainly went to kill a night, and also because there are certain directors (Coen bros, Tarantino, Wes Anderson) where you kind of force yourself to go as a creative and then are pleasantly surprised. I'd been disappointed by Where the Wild Things Are, his last big film, and was prepared for a torturously slow, overly wrought film with forced poignant silences and a lot of wistful gazing off into space.

To be fair, for some people this film might have felt like it had all those things, but I was completely blown away. Especially knowing that Spike Jonze wrote the entire script. I used to have a pretty illogical dislike of Jonze (WHY does he spell his name like that? And why was he so dismissive to Sofia Coppola in Lost in Translation?? Why was Where the Wild Things Are so boring???)

But Jonze pulled a fast one on us, and made the first really deeply philosophical film I've seen in long, long time on the most universal questions of the world: What is life? What is love? When you love someone, why is it so hard to give, and when you need love, why is it so hard to get? Why are we so destructive?

Obviously I spent most of the movie crying, but it also was surprisingly funny. And it wasn't just the writing, the whole thing worked together beautifully for me. The story, which I assumed would be trite and overdone, was nuanced and compelling and fascinating for me to wonder what would happen next. The future-ish setting felt very restrained, and the art direction of the sets, the colors, the framing, I loved everything. I loved the camera work and editing, which is something that only nerdy wannabe filmmakers/critics say, but I'd felt especially moved by the camera work in Breaking Bad recently and have started paying more attention to that kind of thing. I'm bummed Joaquin didn't get an Oscar nom.

Anyway, that's a lot to say about a movie, I have even more but am restraining myself. I'm glad I forced myself to go out and see it, and even though I'm in a completely unrelated industry, that kind of attention to detail and plain old hard work that can create something which transcends "work" into something else, is something I need to be reminded of every day.