점심 맛있었어요! Lunch was delicious!

Lunch is often my favorite meal of the day during the week. I never have to worry about figuring out what I'm going to eat, because I eat in the cafeteria with other teachers. Sometimes it's not exactly what I want, but usually it hits the spot. Today we actually had spaghetti with meat sauce (including mushrooms and corn) and vegetable/seaweed mixed rice patties (I don't remember the actual name of them) with orange juice. The spaghetti this time around was pretty good, not sweet like the last time. And it's funny that no matter how many carbs or starches lunch includes, you can always guarantee there will be rice. Some Koreans have told me if they don't have rice everyday their stomachs feel empty. Bread is actually thought of as an in-between-meals snack, not part of a meal like we eat it in the West. So if I tell Sun Jung that I had a bagel for breakfast or even just some yogurt or fruit, she thinks I'm not eating enough. She eats rice, soup, kimchi, and sometimes fried eggs for breakfast. After all, it is the most important meal of the day.

I'm getting side-tracked. My point is, yesterday's lunch was way better! There was 오의 김치 (cucumber kimchi--my fav), rice, orange halves, some kind of salty, brown-brothed crab soup with small crabs in it chopped in half, and my new favorite dish: 장조림!

장조림(jang jo lim) is tender chunks of beef and hard-boiled quail eggs cooked in a type of soy sauce marinade. This is the second time I've had it. The first, that I remember at least, is when Sun Jung's mom sent a package of her home-cooked food and Sun Jung gave me a plastic container of it. I love her mom's cooking so of course it was delicious then, and at lunch yesterday it was just as good.