They looked like something from 1970s Korea. A few ajumas -- older Korean ladies -- giggled at us as we walked by.

Even so, each of the restaurants looked homey, and they seemed to welcome everybody.

Green tea.

Bee bin bap. Very nice and tasted different from the one I tried it Santa Clara. Maybe because the sauce here is sweeter.

Omu rice. Rice fried with tomato sauce, wrapped in omelette. Quite nice too.

home cooked pasta (with lotsa mussels and clams)

i'm usually not a big fan of pasta but i LOVE this to smithereens. i dig mussels. my mom is an amazing cook! i would love to be able to cook like my mom someday. i call this the godly pasta.

Hyang-To Gol at Amara

i LOVE everything about korean food! the last time i had korean food, i burnt myself and went clubbing smelling totally BBQed. i'm craving for kimchi now! i want some korean food!

You could on the other hand take advantage of the low price of wine at the Carrefour supermarket around the corner and buy a fine 2004 Rioja for under three euros a bottle. The economy is certainly pretty messed up.

I am sitting here eating kimchi.  I wrote yesterday that I would try some different types of food and, true to my word, I purchased some horrible cuts of meat from the supermarket after being unable to cater to my wife’s request to find any fish that did not taste of fish.

Little did I know that a day later I would be eating Korean food.  It is not quite what I had in mind, thinking that being in Barcelona I would be focussing on traditional food from the region, but kimchi it is, and it is delicious.

A grandmother prepared it.  Everyone knows that grandmothers make the best home cooking.  Food cooked by grandmothers always tastes better than that of their daughters.  Fact.  No dispute. It simply tastes better in the same way sandwiches cut into triangles taste better than those that are simply cut in half.  The old (she looks old) Korean lady is the grandmother of one of the international students that attend the same school as my girls.  Somehow, along the way, the grandmother found out that I liked food that is highly spiced.  She presented me with a large bag of bright red kimchi, carefully wrapped in plastic and tucked into an old carton of, what appears to be, brown sugar.

Having grown up in SE Asia, Hong Kong to be precise, I have been fortunate enough to have experimented with numerous dishes, from all over Asia.  As it happens Korean food has always ranked way up there in my list of favourites.

Back when I was racing my bicycle full time, I used to treat myself to a Korean BBQ every now and then. The restaurant of choice was located in the once sleepy fishing village of Sai Kung, in Hong Kong. A rather incongruous place for a Korean restaurant but one that had a loyal Korean following.

The restaurant was small and was arranged around booths, with a table in the middle that contained a gas fired BBQ grill.  Customers sat on benches either side of the table.  Small demure Korean girls brought out raw meats, fish and random vegetables to your table, along with copious amount of beer.  This was good. You were then given two sets of chopsticks.  This was confusing.

A wooden pair was meant to be used for attempting to deliver the raw meat to the grill without dropping it in your beer en route, and for turning over the meat whilst it was cooking.  The smaller plastic pair of chopsticks was used to eat with. The general idea was not to mix the two pairs up as you would (a) burn your lips on the hot wooden chopsticks or (b) melt the plastic ones on the grill. It was a mathematical certainty that with enough beer inside you both ‘a’ and ‘b’ would take place.

Back to Kimchi.  Apart from the taste, which, as I have already said, is truly delicious, it is considered a ‘healthy food’ by the US magazine ‘Health’. In fact it is listed as one of the top five "World's Healthiest Foods" for being rich in vitamins, aiding digestion, and even possibly retarding cancer growth.  Hmmm….all good then.

I have decided to take two days off training.  I feel I need to have a bit of a rest.  I believe that I am knocking on the door of being over trained at the moment.  If life was super chilled and I was not juggling looking for a job and dealing with life’s other challenges I could probably handle a greater training load. But I can’t.  One thing I have learnt is that if in doubt. Rest.  Over-training will set you back much further than losing a day or two to rest.

In the case of cycling, over training often happens when a cyclist is training alone and is driven to exceed.  The days are long and rather than sit about watching wildlife documentaries on the television they head out on the bike and ‘beast’ themselves.  Either that or they don’t rest enough coming off a hard event, starting too early on their next ‘block’ of training, without allowing adequate rest.

I am sure many a professional cyclist has trained hard for a long stage race, to find that they have peaked just as the race begins.  For the first few days all goes well and then? Well and then, their legs fall off.

So having said all that I feel quite happy sitting here eating my red-hot kimchi.  I have researched the numerous health benefits and know that I am not over-training. I also have just over two euros in my pocket, which is probably more than the American Treasury Secretary has in his, unless he has managed to get his seven hundred billion dollars.

I may even go a buy a bottle of Rioja.  If I have any change left I will save it for my next rest day.

this is for anonymous who asked about a recipe for 떡볶이 (choose your awkward alliteration here: (a) tteokbokki, (b) dduk bok ki, (c) tuck bok key ).

if you're not familiar with maangchi, the hot mama in the video, check out her site www.maangchi.com

she's got a whole collection of recipe videos set to hilarious hip hop beats. (i wonder if she calls herself maangchi because she's like MC hammer in the kitchen.) i haven't tried making any of her recipes but they're fun to watch nonetheless, mostly because she reminds me of the man-eater ajummas i used to see in seoul. as i watched this video, i kept thinking, "she is so gonna dribble dduk bok ki sauce all over her tight white top."

Everyone visiting Seoul should visit at least once, its fantastic, a great eating experience with other exotic Korean food and drinks to supplement the main course.

Salad, water, beer and soup are the perfect partners for these dishes.

I have just drank a lot of beer tonight and decided to create a few before the buzz wore off. If they suck... Well fuck it I was drunk. If they are good... I meant to do that.

Who wants to pull my finger?

One of my frequently visited and favorite blogs is FatManSeoul.com, which is a sister site of FeetManSeoul.com. FatManSeoul is a foodie blog dedicated to cover the very useful and fantastic tips and knowledge about food available out there in Seoul, Korea. The blogger is also my good friend from Portland who knows how to enjoy and appreciate the Korean culture and especially the cuisine, having gotten a lot of experience with diverse Korean food at many eateries ranging from deluxe gangnam restaurants to humble but terrific 포장마차 or street snack vendors. 

FatManSeoul is:

Korea's first bilingual online magazine about food. We’re committed to searching high and lo, from the poshest cuisine of Kangnam to the most humble, jeong-laden jjigae of the halmoni-jip in the countryside for the best food in the country. Come here for reviews, recipes, interviews, podcasts, tutorials, and the best, most accurate information on ingredients and methods, in Korean and in English.　같이 먹자!

The blog's latest entry, "Ice, Ice, Baby - Gourmet takes on 냉면," linked a Gourmet article reporting on the  Korean traditional cold noodle called 냉면/Naengmyeon, and demonstrated again the power of Korean food . The picture in the article was so enticing that it drove me to write a new post immediately to spread out the irresistible temptations of the Korean food. This article was tremendously powerful enough to almost end all my internal conflicts about the planning out for this winter break... I will go back home to Korea!

We went to Morrisons Supermarket to shop for some fresh vegetables and fruits. We also had our lunch there.

This is my lunch. You thought one is not enough right? Then you are wrong, the cream made me feel very full. Of course, i also thought this small thing will not have make me full so i go for another one.

So i ended up feeling very full!!! With a cup of drink, mine cost 2.5pound.

This is Li Lee's lunch, it came with a small pack of chips.

That is Yvo's lunch which came with quite a big portion of salad.

Suan's pasta is too chessy. Zylei also had the same order as Kaya, the chicken thing...... Not quite sure what it is but it taste like curry chicken. Hahaha.....

So after having our meals out for the past few days, we decided to cook our own dinner. Guess what it is.

Haha...... Because that is the only food i know how to cook well.

It smells nice and taste nice too because we were already very hungry. Can't find the egg???

After finishing the first round, Zylei and i both get to have a second serving because 2 packs of the ramyun turns out to be a lot especially when we added a lot of vege in.

Hahaha....... Although we claimed the food to be too much, we still finish it without leaving even a single drop of the soup.

Well, that's all for today! 

KoJa Productions team is a big fan of this delicious food! It makes me starving just looking at the picture. Grr... my stomach is rumbling.

Kimchi is also spelled Gimchee or Kimchee. It is a famous Korean traditional food, which is made with vegetables with varied seasonings, most commonly referring to the spicy baechu variety. Kimchi is mostly eaten with rice... rice! Kimchi is also used to make other stuff, such as: kimchi stew (kimchi jjigae) and kimchi fried rice (kimchi bokkeumbap).

Hmm... Kimchi is delicious, I suggest you try it yourself.

And Judah finished everyone's leftovers...

...and kept going...

and going, until there wasn't a scrap of rice left.

there was a time when you say korean food, one would think of kimchi. but as koreans come and stay, and as long as korean telenovelas are seen and raved about, we filipinos get to acquaint ourselves more and more about koreans and their culture. so now, when someone thinks of korean, one thinks of hyundai starex, tia ling, samsung, lg, seri pak, jumong, kimchi, and last but not least - taran! - korean beef stew.

600 grams beef short ribs
1 liter water
7 tablespoons white sugar
1/3 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons chinese cooking wine
1 tablespoon minced garlic
2 teaspoons sesame oil
1/2 teaspoon minced ginger
2 stems leeks
2 green siling mahaba (pangsigang) or whatever you call it in the english speaking countries
1 teaspoon toasted sesame seeds

1 in a heated wok, put about 3 tablespoons of oil and brown the short ribs (preferably in batches). if short ribs is not available, you can use any of the stewing beefs from shanks to brisket.

2 using an enameled pot or any kalderos around, saute a tablespoon of garlic in oil used in browning the meat. saute it for a minute in low to medium heat without browning the garlic and add the half teaspoon of minced ginger before putting in the browned beef short ribs.

3 let the beef simmer for 5 minutes before adding the liter of water (covering the meat in the process). bring to boil.

4 add the sugar, the soy sauce, the chinese cooking wine and the sesame oil. cover pot and let the whole thing simmer lowering the heat setting to its lowest.

5 cook for an hour and a half to 2 hours. add sugar or salt to taste. this dish should be on the sweet side rather than on the salty side.

6 add the chopped leeks (a quarter of an inch long), the green chilies (sliced diagonally) and the toasted sesame seeds (fried in a wok without using oil and stirring constantly until toasted; similar to frying dilis) before serving.