Sunday Meal

My mother is a very good cook. She cooks all sorts of food very well, and I usually like the food she cooks, over most of the food I eat out with my family and friends. Usually, my mom would cook for the sake of eating healthy food that is not loaded with preservatives and nutritious food over the fatty food that I eat out with my friends. She used to cook almost all three meals a day for me, sometimes starting off with a continental breakfast with eggs and sausages, and pancakes and waffles with tons of maple syrup. Other times, she would brew Kimchi stew or Sagol Stew, which is cow bones boiled in hot water for 12 hours, which kind of taste like chicken noodle soup. For lunch, she would sometimes make me namul, side dish vegetables, japchay, noodles with sesame oil and vegetables, and ddakggochi, chicken, pork, and beef marinated in spicy sauce and cut up into pieces then assorted into a chop-stick like stick. There was no doubt that I loved my mom’s cooking more than any other food and it also came with the benefit of being very healthful.

My dad was a horrendous cook. He would sometimes try to cook for us, but usually ended up burning all the food and making the frying pan into an unusable black disfigured mess. He would add too much water when he attempted stews, that tasted like water, with a hint of the actual stew. He would overcook the meat, so that it would stick to the pan and I we had to scrape it off with a spoon or knife. His effort was evident, but there was no dispute that he just couldn’t cook compared to my mom. He would attempt to cook a lot, but usually failed without avail.

However, one day, my dad discovered one type of food he could cook without failing. It was a type of Korean packaged noodles, called japaghetti, which was very easy to cook. He would take two cups of water and start boiling it. After it started boiling, he would add the vegetables and meat flakes and shortly after add the noodles. After the noodles were properly cooked, he would drain almost all the water and add the black powdered sauce, added the olive oil packet and started mixing the noodles, until the powdered sauce turned into a paste-like substance. After mixing the noodles thoroughly until the sauce was well-distributed, he moved the noodles into a dish and brought out the Kimchi from the fridge, spicy red cabbage. As my entire family ate the food my dad prepared every Sunday, I felt proud and relieved that my dad found a food he could cook more deliciously than any other person, even more than my mother.

Image: http://cfs13.tistory.com/image/31/tistory/2009/02/02/10/27/49864c0737a68