Seaweed Salad and Ginger Squid/Oldboy

Hello Kim’s adoring public!  This will be a break from her irregularly scheduled brilliance for a guest post by me, the mysterious and silent ‘boyfriend.’

Pictured: My hand and a molleja taco.  Not Pictured: the food I'm cooking in this post.

These two dishes fit with Oldboy because they’re from Japan and Oldboy is from…  South Korea.  Close enough.  Had I watched the movie first, I probably would have gone with dumplings, but that’s water under the bridge.  I’m new at Japanese food, so I made a few key mistakes (like cooking squid in a poorly ventilated apartment... it still smells like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in here).  It was tasty, though, so I’ll definitely be trying again.

Seaweed Salad

1.5 oz dried wakame seaweed

6 tablespoons rice vinegar

6 tablespoons soy sauce (I subbed ‘liquid aminos’ so my vegan roommate could have some)

2 tablespoons sesame oil

2 teaspoons sugar

Red chili paste to taste

2 teaspoons finely grated ginger

1 teaspoon minced garlic

2 scallions, thinly sliced

½ cup shredded carrot

4 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro

2 tablespoons sesame seeds, toasted

Directions:

1.       Soak seaweed in warm water for about 5 minutes.  It will plump up like nobody’s business.

Before:

After:

2.       Toast sesame seeds.

3.       Stir together all other ingredients, add to drained seaweed and toss.  Sprinkle with sesame seeds.

Slimy... yet satisfying!

 This salad got about 4x better after sitting in the fridge overnight, so that is definitely the way to go.

And now, because that was wayyyy too easy, we get to make:

Ginger Squid (or Ika Shoga Yaki if you’re inclined to watch a lot of anime)

Ingredients: 

1 lb squid tubes

2 tbsp grated ginger

3 tbsp soy sauce (real deal because vegans don’t count as people)

2 tbsp Mirin (A sweet cooking sake.  I subbed regular sake and a teaspoon of sugar.  Then I had a nice drink to go with the meal.)

2 tbsp vegetable oil

Directions:

1.       Combine ginger, soy, and mirin in a large bowl.  Honestly, I would switch to pre-grated ginger for a recipe like this.  You won’t lose much in taste and grating ginger is probably my least favorite kitchen task.

2.       Clean your squid REALLY well.

3.       Slice squid into rings.

4.       Mix squid into marinade.  Allow to stand for 15 minutes.

Are you hungry yet?

5.       Add squid to hot oil on your stovetop.  It will release a TON of liquid as it cooks.

6.       Cook until firm, about 5-7 minutes.

Some day I want to be cool enough to cook only with chopsticks, but I'm definitely not there yet.

7.       Add the remaining marinade to the squid about a minute before you take it off.

8.       Serve over rice.

9.       Enjoy your food while saying vaguely Japanese-sounding things to your friends.  If you need a refresher on vaguely Japanese-sounding things, I recommend Lost in Translation.  If you don’t have any friends, I recommend local rec-sports leagues.

And now, Our Feature Presentation:  Oldboy

Netflix has been pestering me to watch Oldboy since the day it became available.  Given the kind of movies I usually watch, I have to admit that it wasn’t a bad pick. 

Oldboy follows Oh Dae-su, who is kind of a jerk.  He gets abducted in the first scene and spends the next 15 years locked in a hotel room without ever being told why he is there.  He spends most of that time training, and comes out determined to hunt down his captor no matter what it takes.

There’s not much else that I can tell you that won’t spoil plot points, so I’ll keep it general.  Expect a plot twist… a HUGE one.  Really the whole movie is a buildup to that one plot twist.  

Even M. Night thought so.

The movie does a good job keeping you in step with Oh Dae-su.  By the end, you are just as desperate to know the truth as he is, and just about as shocked at the result.

Production notes: This movie was beautifully made.  The atmosphere compliments the story without overwhelming it (ie: A Scanner Darkly).  There is just enough wrongness in the way things look and behave for you to see the world like Oh Dae-su.

I liked the ‘message’ surrounding the twist in the same way that I appreciate really dense sci-fi books: not because it was particularly well done, but because it posed an interesting thought experiment.  What I didn’t like was how far they had to stretch reality to make it work.  In sci-fi, you can just build it into the rules of your universe.  In Oldboy, it seemed like they were trying to fit this story into the 'real world,’ so they had to use a lot of deus ex machina.  The bad guy was inexplicably all-powerful and all-knowing and his plan worked entirely too perfectly. 

I would recommend Oldboy if you feel like a dark mystery-turned-what-the-hell-just-happened.  You should definitely get the subtitled version, though.  Netflix only has dubs and most of the actors were terrible.