Cold noodles for hot days.
There's nothing better than a bowl of cold Kong-guksu in August.
Happy Friday,
I’ve been putting thought into how to make this Substack a bit more sustainable for myself. I’ve been enjoying the process of pushing out writing on a weekly basis, but frankly, it has started to become a real grind.
When I started this it was incredibly fun and a good way to challenge myself to grow in my own writing. Writing every week is still fun and rewarding for the most part but I have been struggling to find a good balance. It generally takes me about 20-30 hours to outline/ideate, jot down notes, collect photos, and write a post that I feel is good enough to send out. Again, fun and rewarding but as my own freelance work is slowly picking up my writing time usually takes a hard hit leaving me to anxiously scramble to get something together or not even write at all for that week.
Personally, if I lose my sense of joy in doing something it becomes incredibly arduous and I tend to take a break. This Substack is something I don’t want to let fall to the wayside and I want to continue to grow it, so I want to try a different posting schedule to make this more sustainable for myself.
I will be posting the usual longer posts on the industry, restaurant and wine recs, and thought pieces around food culture in general on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of every month. I will be posting more practical food recipes (with some writing of course) on the 2nd and 4th Friday of every month, which will be primarily for paid subscribers.
I’ll be trying this schedule out for the next couple of months to see how it goes and I would love your thoughts on it as well! Thanks for being flexible and for taking the time to read this newsletter.
Onto this week’s recipe.
I love summer. I’m a June baby and have always loved the summertime. Growing up in the South, summers were it. Endless pool days, river hangs, lake outings. Whenever I have a chance to go be a beach bum out on some coastline, I am truly in my best form and at my happiest.
I had a brief stint in Korea when I was a kid while my mom was figuring out her visa situation; to this day I still have vivid memories from that season. My parents both grew up in the countryside outside of Daegu, about a 3-hour drive southeast of Seoul and an hour north of the southernmost city Busan. That summer was hot and damn humid. All you can hear after the regular thunderstorm downpours was just a blanket of white noise from the cicadas. I remember wandering around the neighborhood by myself as an elementary school kid; throwing rocks into rice fields, avoiding adults because I was shy about being an American kid with broken Korean, and looking for different markets that would sometimes house different arcade games like Metal Slug and Tekken (iykyk).
I don’t remember the food all too much from that trip. I remember going to a Pizza Hut in downtown Daegu, which was a mind-blowing experience. A Pizza-hut that was a sit-down restaurant with a full-blown salad bar??? I guess fast food joints have always been better outside of the States.
I also vividly remember when my uncle made Kong-guksu (콩국수); a cold noodle dish that is only served in the summertime. A pile of cold wheat somen noodles sitting in a bowl of ice-cold grainy soybean milk topped with cucumber batons, a boiled egg, cherry tomatoes, sesame seeds, and a handful of ice. I don’t know what it was about it. Maybe it was the first meal that made me feel like I was grown up after being littered with praise from my uncle and grandparents for crushing a massive bowl. Or maybe it is the one dish that makes me always think of that summer in Korea.
This past Monday, my mom sent me a photo of a bowl of kong-guksu that she made for dinner and it sent me. I was craving a bowl of this like a fiend. Living in NYC has its perks; finding good kong-guksu is definitely NOT one of them. Luckily, it’s easy as hell to make and since it’s still hot as a mf outside, this dish is a good one to do ASAP.