School lunch success

Every now and again, school lunch manages to knock one out of the park. Or to eliminate figures of speech: sometimes lunch tastes very delicious. The second sentence just doesn’t “taste” the same though. Today we had pork rib pot roast with mushrooms and root vegetables (yeong-yangdwaejigalbijjim), flour dumpling soup, sticky rice with some red beans for color (gangnangkongbap), radish sprouts (sugjunamulmuchim), and salted cabbage (really a sort of spicy kimchi, I think). While I could have lived without the last two, though I made my best effort with them, the rest of the meal was so satisfying and hearty! Mushrooms are no joke here—they’re amazing! I’ve seen several varieties, and they always add good flavor and nice texture to a dish, whether it’s a soup or otherwise.

The dumpling soup (called samsaeksujebiguk, according to the daily lunch menu message) was good too—usually any starch found in the soups here is rice-based, but these were hearty, homemade dumplings (with a twist). Just like tri-color pasta, these dumplings came in classic flavor, while some were made with spinach, and some were made with carrots. It made for some of the prettiest dumping soup I have eaten, and it tasted so good! Relative to most of the school’s daily soups, this broth was mild in flavor, with just a little bit of a kick to accompany the seaweed, carrot slices, and squash that also garnished the broth.

Earlier in the week, we had a side dish that I may have to try making on my own sometime. It was a combination of potato and macaroni salad (white, smooth and creamy), and it had raisins and finely chopped peanuts in it, as well as a few flakes of fresh chopped parsley for some color. It wasn’t very salty, nor was it very sweet, just a nice, creamy, comfort-food sort of side dish. I’m not sure if these sorts of dishes have a specific name—they might just be thrown together at the kitchen’s whims—but regardless, it was a highlight of the lunch menu this week.

Yesterday didn’t seem to have an evident source of protein, so it was a little disappointing of a meal and not as fortifying as I would have preferred. The strange side dish of plant stems with red chili pepper sauce and baby fried anchovies earlier on were not the highlight of the week, but the good meals outnumbered the bad ones this week. A good lunch is always a nice treat in the middle of the day, even if I ending up consuming far more than a daily dose of carbs…!