Saturday afternoon we walked to the farmer's market. I got my Korean friend, Hye Sun, to tell me the words, and then I walked down the street asking people "farmer's market?" in an inquisitive tone of voice and getting them to point me in the right direction. Finally we found it :) It was pretty neat :) It was a permanent structure so that the merchants don't have to worry about rain, and many of them had a permanent storage structure/shop, but most of them had their goods spread out in front. As we walked in, we could see a bunch of American products in the store to our left. It turned out to be a kind of kitchen store, which is exactly what the owners of a new oven need! Muffin tins, pot holders, baking dishes, parchment paper, a rolling pin... It's astonishing how much kitchen stuff we needed! Our best find was a pile of "handkerchiefs" -- we bought 14 of them for $7 and now we have cloth napkins!!!! This has really been bugging me, so it might be second only to our new oven as my favorite part of this weekend :) $160 later, we asked the shopkeepers if we could leave our two giant bags of stuff there while we browsed the rest of the market!
We passed a fruit vender, and got a bag of nectarines for $5, and then picked up some mushrooms for $2 :) I expressed interest in a weird product, and ended up inadvertently spending $3 on something I'm almost positive I'm not going to eat. And I still have no idea what it's called! Anyhow, the market was fun, although it ended up being very expensive...
Then back home to drop off our stuff and eat a quick (and very late) lunch. Then on to Emart. My first stop was to try to get my Emart card validated -- I'd gotten one last time but didn't have time to stop by the service desk and get the paperwork filled out. So I walked up to the service desk, only to be told by the nice lady that she was signing people up for credit cards, and the service desk was over there. Oops. So I went to the service desk and got my paperwork filled out. Koreans have very small signatures, so it's hard to fit an American signature into the box. I signed it 4 or 5 times, with no idea what I was promising. I guess they'll be by to pick up Haley any day now... Then, as I was walking back into the main part of the store, I paused by the credit card desk... You see, I have no use for a Korean credit card, EXCEPT Costco here ONLY accepts cash or credit cards. Nobody here uses checks, and Costco doesn't accept debit cards :p And shopping with cash isn't much fun because I have to keep up a running total to make sure I don't get to the register with too much stuff :p So I decided to sign up for a credit card too! It's supposed to arrive to Tuesday -- we'll see how that goes. I got a free polka dot tote bag for signing up with the credit card company; Haley immediately claimed it. I also got a free gift with the Emart card. I'm pretty sure it's dish soap; I guess I'll find out when I try to use it *grin*
Then we got to try to figure out clay. I know that in the US we have several kinds of clay. The two big contenders are Playdoh and clay. Haley has to make a model of the Earth (crust, mantle, core, etc) and Playdoh won't be good cause it doesn't really harden up properly. So we got some help and hopefully what we picked will work. Then on the the kitchen section where we picked up a cookie sheet and a tiny pizza pan. Finally downstairs to the grocery section. Apparently they don't have pancake syrup anymore (they did last month) which was a bit of a blow, since we just bought a *huge* bag of pancake mix at Costco :p Also, they have a zillion kinds of flour and I'm having a hard time telling them apart. Who knew that cookies required a different kind of flour than noodles? Stranger yet, it's the noodle flour that has "All Purpose" on it in English, though I am definitely taking that with a grain of salt. I bought both just in case! Speaking of salt, all the salt here seems to be sea salt. It's not bad, just different.
Finally, we took a taxi back home. Since it was already 8:30 and we were both pretty tired, my plans of making a potpie out of the leftover chicken stew crashed and burned into the reality of a "forage for yourself" night.
Sunday dawned. I'm sure it did, but I didn't see it until much later, since I had stayed up until 3 researching pie crust on the internet. You see, my favorite pie crust recipe requires shortening. Shortening may or may not exist here, but I haven't seen it. So I needed to figure out how to make a pure butter pie crust. I actually found a great recipe online, called The Food Lab: The Science of Pie Dough. Yeah, it turns out to be written by one of the guys who helped write my awesome cookbook that's got all the whys and hows and "what happens if you try it this way"s of cooking :) So that's the pie crust I ended up making today. It turned out pretty well, I think. Flakier than my usual pie crust for sure. I think it was maybe a little overdone, since I like my crust a little moister... I think I need to calibrate my oven... The only number on the dial that's still legible is 200˚ C. Which is great, since that's the temp at which I wanted to bake my pie crust. However, it didn't get done and didn't get done so I ended up just turning it up a bit. I'm not sure how much each of the rest of the tick marks is worth, so I'm not sure what temp I ended up at. Maybe a thermometer should be my next purchase.
I tried going to the health food store, while I was chilling my pie crust dough between making it and baking it. However, the store owner didn't have any of the things I was looking for. No coconut oil, no flax seeds, no Dr. Bronner's soap, no henna. She sent me to a cosmetics store on the next block that very definitely didn't have any of that eco-friendly stuff :( I'm a bit worried about that, because there's no way my flax seeds will last me a whole year, and my hair is desperately in need of a touch-up henna job :p As a country mouse, I tend to think that cities will have lots of big stores. It seems that (in Busan, at least) they just have a ton of small stores, so that each neighborhood is like a small town. So the quest for a hippie store continues...
Anyhow, after all that business about buying the clay, Mom mentioned on Skype that I could just mix salt and flour and water to make baker's clay. Duh! A good thing too, as we didn't buy nearly enough of the official stuff. Luckily I had a big bag of flour. I'm not sure what kind, though Hye Sun says it's not the regular flour I thought it was. It makes great dough though:) Alas, we ran out of salt (yes, that bag I *just* bought!) and when Haley ran downstairs with our empty bag of sea salt, the basement claimed not to have any. So we'll have to buy more salt to make more dough tomorrow. Yes, a half-sphere that is 20 cm across uses a *lot* of dough!
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