No body stole we egg!!

Today was Tuesday of week 3 at the English hakwon, and it's definitely getting to be easier and more fun. Now that the tone is set and I've met all the students, I can be a little more myself and a little less stick-to-the-book-and-schedule. Yes, there are still those few kids who don't listen, but I'm realizing that once they see I'm not going to stop class just for their sake, they don't fool around as much. They have a system where if doing something nice or doing well on a test earns them Talking Club bucks, and if they fool around, leave class to go to the bathroom or get water (it's only a 50 minute period), or other naughty things, we take away Talking Club bucks. Every 4 months, they get a Market Day where we provide food and goodies that they can buy with their bucks. It just so happens that the next Market Day is this Friday, so maybe that's why they're behaving a little better in class...

Speaking of markets, here's a picture of an Angry Birds sweatshirt I found at a 5-day market (오일장, a market that opens every 5 days); the caption made me giggle:

Not sure whether the birds or the pigs are talking.

I bet you're wondering, how do people keep track of the 5-day market? Well, at least I did when I first heard about it. It's simple, they just open on the same days of every month, i.e., the 1st, 6th, 11th, etc. through the 26th. I know, I thought it would be something nifty and complicated and exclusive like someone has to tell you or you have to stumble upon it yourself the first time you go and then you get some sort of calendar for the year or... maybe that's just me.

First time staying up til midnight in a while for me. Staying for a few days with my aunt, uncle, and cousins who come home and stay up super late as opposed to my grandma who sleeps by 9pm-ish and wakes up at 4:30 in the morning and who keeps bugging me to go sleep if I don't go to bed at the same time as she does. What a change from 3 or 4am during school... Point being, I's tired from switching from my grandma's sleep schedule so good night! Will try updating again within the week =)

Happy Harvest Moon!

Last night (or tonight, depending on your time zone) was (is) the night of the harvest moon aka August 15th of the lunar calendar aka Chuseok (추석) aka Korean thanksgiving. Chuseok is a Korean national holiday, during which schools and businesses are closed, so you know what that means... 4-day weekend!

Oh yeah, forgot to say, I have a job now, which is why I even have weekdays and weekends. I'm working as an English teacher at E Bo Young Talking Club, an English-teaching franchise in South Korea. I just finished my first week there, and it was quite interesting. I wasn't even planning on working, really, but my aunt randomly called me last Friday, saying that she had found a hakweon (학원) at which I might be interested in working, and would I be ready to go for an interview that afternoon. Well, I went to said interview and was hired on the spot, which was also a surprise. She told me to come on Monday so that I could observe since I'd had to experience teaching English and that I'd start working after Chuseok. Come Monday, I showed up and she gave a brief--oh so very brief--introduction to everything and then told me to start. Start?! Now?! I asked if I could at least observe just one class, to which she said, we'll see... and then before I knew it, the kids were showing up, and I had to teach. WHAAAAAT. I was coming in midyear as a new teacher and I didn't even know beyond a basic outline what I was supposed to cover, nor did I have an introduction ready, nor was I in the least bit prepared! I guess it turned out fine because she told me to come back the next day. Actually, she'd originally had me down to come 3 times a week, but when I came back the second day, she told me to come Monday through Friday, so she must have liked me, although I can't possibly see how after that first day. The classes are small, three to six kids each, and each class is only 50 minutes long (I teach 3 a day), but that doesn't mean some of the classes aren't a handful, particularly the youngest ones. I think the biggest challenge is remembering to keep my English as simple as possible. The older classes understand more English and pay better attention, so the day gets easier as it goes on. There is one high school class at the end of the day but I only got to teach that one once because it's normally taught by the other teacher. In total, there are 3 teachers (the director, another teacher, and me) and 35 kids, and I think it's gonna be fun.

And funny story about Talking Club, when I started, the director asked for my English name. When I told her I just go by Yoongi, she was surprised and said that all the kids have English names, so I should come up with one for myself too... But I couldn't think of anything so I had the kids call me Jeena for a day. It was downright bizarre. So the next day I went back and convinced my boss to let them call me by my real name, so everyone's back to calling me Yoongi. Hooray! Anyway, back to Chuseok.

During Chuseok, families gather to honor their ancestors, and there is lots of food involved. Of the food traditionally eaten during Chuseok, songpyeon is probably the most well-known--songpyeon is a small rice cake with various sweet fillings, such as sesame seeds with honey, chestnut paste, or red bean paste. And it's delicious. Aside from songpyeon, my diet yesterday consisted of: rice, beef, pork, tempura mushrooms, onion pancakes, fish, seaweed soup, gosari, soybean sprouts, calamari, various kinds of kimchi, various kinds of rice cake, ice cream, apples, grapes, and tangerines. It's an understatement to say I was full at the end of the day.

The day started with some intense cleaning on account of the family coming over. Since I live with my grandma, and on Chuseok you come to honor your ancestors, it makes the most sense for the family to come here. After cleaning the bathrooms, vacuuming, and wiping down the floor, it was time for some cooking. My mom taught me how to make super yummy seaweed soup:

Ingredients: seaweed, water, garlic, sesame oil, sea urchin (optional)

Directions:

First, if you're using dry seaweed, you have to rewet it.

• Soak it in water until it opens up to its normal underwater state.
• Strain all the water, then add a couple handfuls of salt. Rock salt works best.
• Rub the seaweed as if you were handwashing it and the salt were soap.
• Once the seaweed feels smooth and soft, wash and then drain and squeeze the water out.

Next take your peeled garlic cloves and crush them.

Then, get your pot that you will use for the soup, as well as your sesame oil, garlic, and seaweed. 

Pour a few tbsp of sesame oil into the pot and turn to medium-low heat--your pot is temporarily a frying pan.

Add the garlic, and once the garlic looks golden, add the seaweed and sautée for a couple minutes.

Then add however much water you want in your soup, put the lid on, and turn to high heat.

When the water starts to boil, turn down the heat and add your sea urchin.

Let it simmer until the sea urchin is done (solid instead of goop), and voila! Soup.

Okay, it doesn't look like much but it's delicious.

After we were done cooking, it was time to pray. My grandma is the teacher/caretaker of a temple belonging to an old Jeju religion with a female deity, who is the mother of heaven and earth. This temple is part of the house where my mom, grandma, and I are living. My grandma wakes up incredibly early every morning to pray at 5am. On the 5th, 15th, and 25th of every month, other practicers of the religion, mainly elderly Korean ladies, come to the temple to pray at noon. Since Chuseok falls on the 15th, it coincides with a worship day. At my grandma's urging, I've started participating in the praying ritual, which consists of singing from a prayer book that I can read but wish I understood, and drinking water given by the mother of heaven and earth to her children. I'm slowly learning more about my grandma's religion and its teachings, and am hoping to eventually be able to translate the prayer book and the symbols in the temple.

In the early afternoon, family started arriving, which meant everyone started eating, and by 4pm, there was food piled on every square inch of two dining tables. We all indulged in an early dinner, and then the adults talked for a few hours while me and my 5 cousins played on our respective smartphones. Oh, technology. The boy cousins all disappeared for a while, and when they came back I was disappointed to learn they'd been playing soccer. Not having grown up with my cousins, I'm not very close to them, and there's still a language barrier--which I'm working on, really!--aaaand they probably assumed I didn't want to play. Doesn't make me any less disappointed, though. Oh well, next time.

Then it was evening and time to say good night, because it takes everyone an hour to get home from my grandma's place way out on this side of the island. Soon it was night, and the harvest moon was huge and beautiful, and I wish I could have taken a nice picture, but my phone camera couldn't capture it. Instead, here's a picture of a super cute piglet.

TL;DR: Yesterday was Chuseok and I ate a lot. I have a job teaching English. I'm learning about my grandma's religion. There's a recipe for seaweed soup somewhere above.

Fun fact about peppers

Back when my mom was young, when a boy was born into a household, they would hang up peppers in the entrance walkway to announce that it was a boy. Why? Because the Korean word for peppers is 고추 (gochu) and the Korean word for male member is 꼬추 (cochu--say it the way you'd say a Spanish "c" in the middle of a word), which is phonetically very similar... plus, peppers are rather phallic.

Back on Jeju

Sorry for the lack of recent updates! Here's what happened while I failed to blog, in case you are curious:

• Went to Seoul with my mom for a few days (had to postpone this trip due to heavy rain and flooding in Seoul)
• Returned to the island and found that Ludachrysalis had metamorphosed into Bieberfly-ft-Ludachrysalis without my grandma noticing. I discovered it perched on the windowsill singing "Baby, baby, baby, ohhhh..."
• Heimlich was a close second, emerging the following morning.
• The two of them flew away that afternoon, but I like to think they remember where they were born because I kept seeing black swallowtail butterflies in the garden.
• I had pictures on my phone that I wanted to post of Bieberfly and Heimlich climbing onto my finger when they couldn't yet fly BUT I'm an idiot as you will see in a bullet point below. Instead you can look at this website that has pretty pictures of swallowtail butterflies
• Realized my tastes have changed and that I actually like eating eggplant now
• Went to Los Angeles and San Francisco for much too short of a visit
• Highlights:
• Disneyland
• Free Zippos with free engraving at Brew Co (thanks, Sam!)
• Outside Lands with KKN, best weekend evar
• First dinner with family in a long time =), although we were missing our LA relatives =(
•  Low(?)lights:
• 4 doctor's appointments in 1 painful day, resulting in dilated pupils, a new contact lens prescription, clean teeth but half-numb face after 3 fillings, and sore arms after getting blood drawn and 2 vaccinations. I was just putting that student health insurance to work before the end of the academic year.
• Phone screen shattering--dropped it while feeling kinda woozy on that same doctor's appointment day of hell. (Luckily, I've been paying Best Buy $10/month so that I can get a replacement phone in exactly this sort of instance so now I have a brand new Incredible, which I'm not too sad about. The sad part is, though, that all my pictures were saved in the phone memory, not on the SD card and I didn't bother to upload or copy them to my laptop before I gave it to them, so I lost a bunch of stuff, like my butterfly pictures because I'm an idiot.)
• Leaving again.
• Traveled across the Pacific again and got back late last night
• Made kimchi and noodles from scratch today--will post on how to make those soon

This post is sort of long with no visual excitement so I feel the need to post a picture. Here's one I took during Muse at Outside Lands.

Resourceful?

Today I made 4 slices of French toast using just one egg. I don't know if you could call it French toast, really, but oh well.

I beat one egg, added a little bit of soy sauce and some water to add more volume so I could spread out how many slices of bread the egg could coat, and then I soaked just one side of each slice of bread in the egg before frying.

It's actually kind of tasty, I won't lie.

Rocks, Wind, and Women

... are the three things that are said to be plentiful on Jeju Island, while thieves, beggars, and front gates are said to be absent (at least in the old days).

Rocks: Jeju is a volcanic island, so all around the coast you can see lava rock formations, and stone walls and stone "grandpas" are ubiquitous.

Jusangjeolli

Stone wall

Stone Grandpas + Yoongi (돌하르방)

Wind: It's windy.

Women:

OHAI

In the old days, Jeju fishermen were often lost at sea, leaving behind wives and children and causing a gender imbalance on the island.

However, Korea was also one of many countries that favored having sons over daughters, leading to sex-selective abortion, even in my grandma's lifetime. The feeling was that it was a woman's duty to bear sons. My mom and her two sisters have felt the effects of this preference for sons all their lives. My mom was one of two girls her age to go to middle school in her village, while there was no question that all the boys would get an education. To pay for school, my mom had to comb through already-harvested crop fields for anything left behind that she could sell, while my uncle's education was taken care of by my grandmother. When my grandmother cooked chicken, she gave the meat only to my uncle and not his three older sisters.

The gender imbalance still exists in South Korea but is re-equilibrating from 116 boys for every 100 girls in 1990, and attitudes towards having girls are changing for the better.

Emoticons!

I found these super cool emoticons on the phone my cousin let me borrow:


^-^     happy
*^^*     shy
^ㄴ^     smile
-_-;     embarrassed
-.-     not amused
^.~     wink
@.@     awed
ㅠ.ㅠ     crying
^-^;     sheepish
(?.?)     confused
(`o')     yelling
-_-+     perspiring
(^o^)     laughing
(^.*)    wink
(-_-+)     perspiring
<~_~>    eyes closed?
{>-<}     darnit
('_';)     nervous or embarrassed
(T_T)>;     crying
(-ㅂ-)>     happy
☛_☚     confused?
(=_=)Z     sleeping
($_$)    money on my mind
^o^~♫    singing
♥..♥     pig in love?
*♥o♥*     in love
(~-_-)~     hugging or doing the hula?
(>_<)/     waving
(^_^)/     waving
^-^)b     thumbs up
-_-)a     a-okay?
(/^0^)/     cheering
(-.-)Zzz     sleeping
(♥o♥)/     waving at someone you're in love with?
Q(^.^Q)     pom poms?
S(^▽^)S     squiggly dance?
✩(*^▽^)v✩     victory
( +3+)♥(_ _;)     kissing
(-.-)(_ _)(-.-)     shifty
(-_@=(-_-_)     punch
o('-'o)(o'-')o     dancing
!!!(O.O)!!!     surprised
(^(**)^)~     pig
~~m(^0^)m~~     superman!
( ^o^)U✩U(^o^ )     cheers!
( -_-)/ (((((•~*     shunned?
( ^-^)/(T_T)     comforting a crying friend
☚(>_<☚;)=3=3=3     leaving fast
>(*/*/*)<     candy
@)))))))))     no clue.
@}-->--     rose
<')))))><     fish


You can probably tell I guessed on what some of them mean, haha.

Bye, Ctblla =(

ILMLC ran away =...(

I LST MY LTL CTBLLA

I guess we saw it coming.

Multi-colored Noodle Soup

It sounds deep, right? We're not a melting pot of homogeneous goop, we're a multi-colored noodle soup (with salad as the appetizer), each noodle with its own distinct color and flavor, beautifully intertwining to make the delicious soupy goodness that we call life. Yes, it sounds deep.

But at the time that I was eating my multi-colored soup with my cousins in Jeju City today, all I was thinking was, COOL! Yummy noodles and they're different colors yayyyyy... I so happy... and hungry...

My eldest and 3rd eldest cousin (2nd eldest is in Seoul) invited me to come eat food with them, and when have I ever turned down food? And it only took me TWO WHOLE HOURS to get there on the bus. But it was worth it.

Disclaimer: This part makes me sound like a complete weirdo. Which I am so it's about time you knew anyway.
On the bus I saw three Caucasian folks, the first ones I'd seen in weeks! I really wanted to ask if they were also from the US, but I didn't really know how to start a conversation with them... "Uh, hey, I noticed you guys are white... where ya from?" They weren't really talking to each other either, which meant I couldn't say, "I heard you guys speaking English," etc. Almost two months ago, there were three people speaking French on the bus, so I was admittedly very excited to ask them in French--who knew it would come in handy after coming back from Paris--"Excusez-moi, d'où venez-vous?" ("Excuse me, where are you from?") Turned out they were from Paris visiting Jeju Island on vacation and we had a nice little conversation. I was sort of hoping for a similar friendly exchange with the people on the bus today, but they got off before I could work up to sparking a conversation. I'm really insecure about my Korean-speaking (shameful, I know!) so it would have been nice to speak English with someone other than my mom, but oh well.

Anyway, when I finally got to Jeju City and met up with my cousins, we went to a shabu-shabu (Japanese hot-pot) restaurant, but they had their own twist. It was a prix fixe menu where they give you the traditional vegetable and meat-of-your-choice soup, followed by a multi-colored noodle soup (see above), and it ends with a delicious "healthy rice porridge." Needless to say, I ate a lot.

Might not look like much, but this rice porridge was amazing.

Then, even though our tummies were full to bursting with shabu-shabu, my cousins felt we had to go to Caffe 빠빠라기 (Bbabbaragi) which is well-known for its patbingsu (팥빙수). Luckily, the wait was pretty long (when do you ever hear someone say that?!) so we had some time to make room for said patbingsu.

My cousins! ^-^

After that, it was time to go back home. My aunt and uncle gave me a ride, and when they dropped me off, they also brought... tangerines! My favorite! (This aunt and uncle own a tangerine farm--post to come about that.)

All in all, a good day. Yes, I know basically all I did was eat. Like I said, a good day.

Oh and also all my links are from Wikipedia today.

Chrysalides is the plural of Chrysalis

According to Merriam-Webster, it can also be chrysalises, but chrysalides shows up first. If you're wondering why I had to look that up, it's because I now have 2 chrysalides in my caterpillar jar as of about 9 hours ago! So now we have Ludachrysalis and Heimlich the Chrysalistless (a total turnaround from the constantly eating fatterpillar we knew just yesterday). I caught Heimlich in the middle of his transformation so I took a little video (slightly fast forwarded):

Here are Heimlich and Ludachrysalis side by side:

Carle and ILMLC have both gotten a lot bigger, and ILMLC's starting to turn greener, (which is what soybean loopers do as they get older).

Berries

Today I ate some berries that were growing in the garden. Here are some pictures.

The berry plant

Pre-berry flowers

Post-flower berries

Ripe berries--just grab them lightly with your fingers...

and they slip right into your hand!

Nomz. I wish I knew what they were called.

A non-spicy pepper plant (my mom's favorite) that we bought and planted a week ago--it's already got a baby pepper growing!

Pumpkin flower

Baby pumpkin

Dear mosquitos,

PLEASE STOP BITING ME. IF YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST SUCK MY BLOOD TAKE IT FROM CONVENIENT PLACES LIKE MY FOREARMS--NOT MY ARMPITS OR THE BACK OF MY KNEES. ALSO PLEASE STOP SNEAKING INTO THE MOSQUITO NET AT NIGHT. JUST SHOW SOME COMPASSION, I LIKE MY SLEEP. I HOPE WRITING THIS IN CAPS LOCKS MAKES IT EASIER FOR YOU TO READ.
SINCERELY, FED-UP BITE VICTIM

Caterpillar Update

• I think Katy Pilly is ready to pupate (that is, become a chrysalis for a couple weeks before emerging as a butterfly).
• Heimlich just keeps right on chewing through the loads of parsley I give him. I think he deserves an epithet: Heimlich the Fatter-pillar. 
• I had a scare where I thought Carle was dead, but he just likes to not move for long periods of time. 
• Carle has a new soybean looper buddy who's about one-fiftieth the size of Carle, and whose name is I LST MY LTL CTBLLA (the caption to a well-known drawing by the then quite young Mr. Yanick Alder, and by well-known, I mean among his family and and friends). ILMLC (pronounced ill-milk) for short.

In the following picture, Katy Pilly is at the top with some stringy white stuff she's using to stay attached to the glass where she's been for the past day or so, Heimlich the Fatter-pillar's still eating, Carle's camouflaged on the left, and I can't find ILMLC because he's tiny.

 

 Edit/update: Katy Pilly is now officially a chrysalis so we're changing her name to... Ludachrysalis. Heimlich the Fatterpillar is also preparing for chrysalishood, name TBA. Carle and ILMLC are still eating. I captured all four in the following picture without even realizing it. Can you find them all?

Steamed Egg Custard, recipe as shared by my mom

I'm not much of a cook compared to the rest of my family in Korea or the States, but here is my first attempt at sharing a very simple recipe for those who, like myself, might consider themselves culinarily--dictonary.com says it's a real word--inexperienced. My mom taught me without using exact measurements (and I'm pretty sure no one in my family even uses measuring cups) so you won't find any of those in my recipes, but they're simple enough to follow so have no fear!

Ingredients for steamed egg custard:

• Eggs
• Anchovies
• Water
• Onions

Tools:

• Pot
• Frying pan
• Steamer basket
• Knife
• Chopping board
• Medium-sized stainless steel or ceramic bowl that's small enough to still fit in the pot

Directions:

• Put a few cups of water in a pot (enough to fill the bottom), add a large handful of anchovies and a few pinches of salt, put the cover on, and let it boil for a few minutes. The idea is to let the water be perfused with anchovy flavor (don't worry, it's not a super-fishy taste).
• Let the anchovy water cool down and remove the anchovies from the water. Save the water. (What you do with the anchovies from here is up to you. Add them to your soup or your pizza or feed them to your kitty.)
• Peel and mince an onion (or two if they're on the small side).
• Fry the onions. (Add a bit of cooking oil to the pan, stir fry the onions until they're translucent.)
• Crack open and beat a few (4 is good) eggs in your bowl.
• Add the onions and anchovy water to the egg bowl, making sure it's cool enough not to cook the egg on contact.
• Stir to evenly incorporate the water, egg, and onion. You can add some salt here if you like.
• Add a few inches of water to a pot, put the steamer basket inside, and put your egg bowl on top of the whole setup.
• Cover and let it boil for a good 5 minutes before you lift the cover and stir up the egg. It may look cooked from the outside, but underneath is still raw egg, so allowing the uncooked egg to come in contact with the sides of the bowl will allow the whole mix to cook faster. (This stirring step may not be necessary if you have a relatively thin layer of egg.)
• Put the cover back on and let it cook for another 10-ish minutes, and then you're done!

You can use other ingredients to give your dish some more color or flavor: green onions on top, red onions, different kinds of broth, etc.

Sorry I forgot to take pictures, but your egg custard should look something like this:

Picture courtesy of deliciousasianfood.com

TIL caterpillars poop a lot.

More hungry caterpillars

Two new caterpillars I found eating our parsley. They're gonna grow up to be black swallowtail butterflies, which according to Wiki look like this:

After some Googling, I found out that the little guy I found yesterday is most likely a soybean looper (found on soybean plant, makes "loops" when it inches forward) who will eventually become a moth.

Names: Moth-to-be is Carle (like Eric Carle, the author of The Very Hungry Caterpillar),

Katy Pilly (like Katy Perry) for the smaller one,

and Heimlich for the big guy (like from the movie "A Bug's Life").

My very own hungry little caterpillar

Today my mom found a caterpillar among some soybean leaves she'd picked to eat. It's cute.

She said it was gonna eat up all our young soybean plants so she told me to kill it but I didn't have the heart. So she told me to just put it outside in the neighbor's garden but I didn't want to do that either. So now I'm keeping it in as my pet.

Help me find a name for my new friend!

One way to say that someone gossips a lot:

집에 숟가락 몇 개 있는 것도 안다.
They know how many spoons you have in your house.

She shells sea snails by the seashore

My mom and I went here:

during low tide to catch some of these:

 

by sticking our hands in a trench like this!: 

Okay, it was really more like this... 

but it still seemed counter-intuitive to haphazardly stick my hand in crevices between these igneous rocks:

We caught a whole bunch of these sea snails and brought them home to boil and eat them.

Directions for eating sea snails:

After boiling the sea snails and sterilizing a needle for eating purposes, stick the needle in as far as you can and stab the little snail (sorry, buddy!)

 

Then spin the needle around in the same direction as the shell's spirals:

 And voila you have a ready-to-eat sea snail! I shall call him Squishy and he shall be mine.

Most snails have a little hardened piece of shell attached to the foot for protection--make sure not to eat it!

Garlic

On Jeju Island, almost every other person lives or works on a farm. There are tangerine farms, green tea farms, cucumber farms, you name it. My grandma, even at 83, is still doing daywork on local farms, which makes me shake my head in amazement every time I think about it.

 

Right now it's garlic season, and I'm staying in a particularly garlic-y area (lots of garlic farms) so my grandma recently brought home a ton of garlic. She's going to plant them in her garden, so she laid them all out on the ground in the sun to dry for a day. Then we needed to separate each bulb into its individual cloves (tossing out the nasty mushy ones, of course). 

It's very tempting to use your fingertips alone for the job, but as my grandma had to keep reminding me, when you have a job this big ------------------------------------------------>

your fingertips will inevitably get very sore, so best to employ that fleshy part of your palm right under your thumb as much as possible. (My fingertips still hurt.)

After separating all the cloves, there's always a ton of debris from the outer peel, but all you have to do is fill a bin with your garlic cloves, wait for a good wind, and slowly pour them back onto the ground, as expertly demonstrated by my grandmother in the picture seen on the left.

When you're ready to use the garlic for cooking you peel all the cloves (which, incidentally, you would also do if you're planning to bring garlic through US Customs--one of the few exceptions to bringing produce into the US, no permit required), chop off the top grainy part where it used to be attached to the main stalk... and then there's some debate. Some say mincing garlic is better, some say crushing. The way I learned is:

• Crush the clove with the flat side of your blade
• Smash the partially crushed clove with the bottom of the knife handle (this part:

) 

or I guess you could just get one of these.

 

A lot of people say crushing brings out more flavor. It certainly is a lot juicier. (Tangent: This reminds me of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince when Snape's note in the potions textbook said to "Crush [the sopophorous bean] with flat side of silver dagger, releases juice better than cutting.") (Another tangent: Perhaps crushed garlic wards off vampires better than minced garlic.) (Post-ending tangent: I wonder if they use crushed or minced garlic to make garlic ice cream. I wonder what garlic ice cream tastes like. I'm trying some next time I get a chance.)