My eyes are bigger than my stomach here BUT I feel like I did an okay job of not impulse buying much at H Mart other than sigumchi namul (which I can make) and kohlrabi (which I haven’t seen elsewhere). Oh and tea eggs, and some of the big green onions so I can pan fry them like at this Mexican place I liked back on the island BUT ASIDE FROM THAT, and come on, tea eggs!

At this point you might be asking something like "how does a nice Jewish kid from Georgia wind up into Korean food without having been stationed there?" Strangely I got into it on my own...

My Dad's Army buddies were in Vietnam or sat that war out in Germany. So metropolitan Atlanta had Korean places but everyone Dad worked with was much more excited about being able to get Vietnamese food again after they were all transferred to Ft. McPherson.

I went to college in Ann Arbor (it's a story), which eventually had *one* Vietnamese place to several Korean.

My introduction was the local diner. In the 60s the original Steve sold it to a Korean couple who were fed up with working for UM and decided to run a restaurant. By the 90s, Steve's Lunch had gone to a different Korean family who continued mixing diner and Korean food. For a while they made their own cheesecake, which was awesome, btw. I checked and the new owners there do apparently only Korean food.

$5-6 at Steve's got me hefty portions of noodles, or meat *and* rice *and* pickled cabbage *and* sometimes cubed... what it was exactly, I didn't know. And bi bim bap? I thought I'd discovered the best food deal of the century, and it might've been, too. It doesn't hurt that I decided I liked ggakdugi and baechu kimchi pretty much immediately. And that's how I got into Korean eats.