How hot can you cook without cooking yourself?

In Korea, dining and washing both require cooking yourself.

In Korea, when you eat, you cook it yourself. You sit down by the seashore. They bring you boiling broth. You place it on a flame and boil and boil until the fish is soupy and the soup is fishy.

Each bite is special. Each bite is prepared just so. (This explains why Candace eats her fajitas just so, lining each tortilla with sauteed onion and then pepper and then steak and then salsa, so each bite bites just right.)

You eat your kimchee wrapping up a bite of rice, for the perfect combination of salty and sugary, spicy and chewy.

You eat your eel wrapped in sesame leaf, wrapped in romaine leaf, filled with spicy tofu- miso paste with a slice of garlic with a slice of pepper with slices of ginger -- all in one bite.

All in one just so bite.

In Korea, when you bathe, you cook yourself -- in hotter and hotter water, sometimes with salt and sometimes baking soda. This dish is called jimjilbang.
Jimjilbang comes in many courses.

The first course of jimjilbang is removing your shoes and securing them in #257. Then removing your clothes and securing them in a separate locker, also #257. (Shoes and clothes must be locked in separate lockers in Korea.) You cover your head with a towel. You tie the towel in buns at either side of your head (so your head is just so). You dress yourself in a toga t-shirt and loose culottes. (Don't wrap too tight so the salt seeps in. You need to be just so.)

The course concludes when you see Candace at the foot bath.

At the foot bath, you soak your feet in salt water to loosen your foot skin. You walk on hot rocks to loosen your foot muscles.

Jimjilbang continues with yellow ochre room. The clay hut of yellow ochre room and the ionized heat of yellow ochre room remove the tension of city from your skin and the tension of the city from your body and the tension of the city from your brain.

The next jimjilbang is hotter and saltier. You place yourself prone atop yellow bricks of Himalayan salt glowing clear with heat. As they say, it's not the heat, it's the salt.

To tenderize your corpus and remove the toxins, you "foment" at 80 Celsius amidst red bricks. You freeze at 10 Celsius amidst blue tiles and jelly fish. You foment and freeze alternating every five minutes. It's like basting a Thanksgiving turkey.

To tenderize your brain, jimjilbang doses you with Wave Dream Room and 52 Degree Pyramid Room (the angle of the walls, not the degree of the temperature) and Electron Light Room and even the much renowned Mind Sound Room, with patented Korean rays to induce meditation and sometimes prestidigitation. (It's Zamfir muzak from walls that flow from neon yellow to neon blue to neon red to neon yellow to . . . )

All these courses of jimjilbang desiccate the typical western human (while humecting his skin to mouth watering salty smooth softness). Like a dry turkey, the typical western human at this point in jimjilbang requires rehydration with multi-mushroom stew and bone-dry beer.

Now your jimjilbang is ready to cook. Boil it in salt at 47 degrees for 4 minutes. Bake it in baking soda at 57 degrees for 5 minutes. Bubble in "bade" at 67 degrees for 6 minutes. Dissolve in steam (77 degrees).

Thus is one cooked in Korea at jimjilbang. Koreans call it relaxing. I call it dissolving. Who wants to join me tomorrow?

What just crawled off my plate?

Koreans eat octopus as ubiquitously as Americans eat corn syrup.

octo-on-the-street

Americans offer corn syrup on the street corner as a refreshing drink. Koreans offer octopus on the street corner as a refreshing snack.

The octo-monger heats dried delectables over coals. As the octo-roma warmly wafts, the octo-monger neatly nips into a small snack bag a . . .

• Three-foot long leg of octopus?
• Small, fat cluster of octopus?
• Flattened sheet of octopus?
• Eight-legged, body-and-all, whole octopus?
• Thick round dried tentacle of octopus (the kind that sunk Nemo's Nautilus)?
  

Whichever you choose, strolling away, you contentedly munch on bites of smoky, chewy, sea flavor.

octo-lunch

Americans eat their lunch with corn syrup. Koreans eat their lunch with octopus.

In some cases, the octo-chef sautes and then serves the octo-lunch. If so, it goes like this.

Octo-chef reaches into the octo-tank, the glass walls covered with sticky tentacles. The octo-chef pries a wiggling writher and slips it quickly into bubbling chili paste. Not many seconds later, the octo-chef scissor-slices throughout the octo-stew and brings it to your table, tender, ready to mix with rice and lettuce and seaweed and onions and oh-so-delicious.

In other cases, the octo-chef just serves the octo-lunch. If so, it goes like this.

Octo-chef reaches into the octo-tank, the glass walls covered with sticky tentacles. The octo-chef pries a wiggling writher -- and meanwhile, at your table, salad is steaming on a stove. Atop the salad steaming on the stove, the octo-chef deposits the octopus. It crawls off. A daintily dressed diner plies her chopsticks to drag the tentacles to top the greens again. It crawls off. It sticks to the table. She plies again. It crawls again. She plies again. It crawls again. She's enjoying her lunch. Soon she'll eat it, too.

octo-appetizer
(not for the squeamish)

As all Americans know, sushi is raw fish and it's best without corn syrup. As all Koreans know, sushi is good food and it's best to start with octopus. Yes, the very best sushi-starter is octopus. Mmm, octo-appetizer.

And the very best octo-appetizer is living octopus. Crawling octopus. Squirming octopus.

You sit down at the sushi restaurant. The waiter brings the water. The waiter brings some beer. You eat some salad. You dip your ginger in soy sauce and in wasabi.

You're waiting for your appetizer.

The waiter brings a dish that's white and wiggly. Not the dish itself. The heap of squiggly. The pile of squirming, wirming tentacles. The mass of mouth-size, cut to pieces, living moving octopus.

You grab a tentacle with your chopsticks. The tentacle crawls away.

You grab a tentacle with your chopsticks. The tentacle suction-cups to the plate.

Your grab a tentacle with your chopsticks -- and the tentacle holds onto all the other tentacles!

You grab a tentacle with your chopsticks. The tentacle crawls away.

Koreans like live octopus as an appetizer. Live octopus is appetizing because it takes so long to eat. By the time you wrangle a wiggle to your waiting mouth, you're so hungry, it's so good.

So tender.
So tasty.
So squirmy.

How does grandma karaoke?

Family dinners in a Korea differ from family dinners in the U.S. -- and it's not just the food.

But let's start with the food. You eat rice, of course, and then you share all the other dishes, reaching into the middle of the table with your chokura (chopsticks) to grab bite by bite:

• Steamed octopus dipped in sweet chili sauce
• Boiled uncured bacon dipped in salty-salty-salty fish dip
• Cabbage pickled in garlic and chili paste
  
• Greens with chilis
• Skate wing pickled with garlic stems and chili paste
• Blue crabs, raw with garlic and chili paste
• Beef short ribs sliced thin and broiled in garlic
  

You don't drink wine or water or beer or even sparkling apple cider (as we did as kids at pesach). Every few minutes you have a shot of soju (rice vodka) -- everyone reaches into the middle of the table and says kombae or cheers.

Soju has a lots of its rituals too. For example, you never pour your own. When a more senior person pours for you, you hold your glass with two hands. Similarly, if you pour for him, you hold the bottle with two hands.

The next course is fruit and rice cakes.

The whole meal is had at a pap-sang, or short table set in the middle of the room around which you sit cross-legged.

Or rather at two pap-sangs -- one for the men, one for the women.

After dinner, everyone goes to the nooraybong or karaoke. Except the two youngest daughters-in-law who have to stay home and do the dishes.

Below is grandma singing at the club: