It is 2020 and We Are Food Blogging, Baby!

Last Tuesday, a friend died unexpectedly. On Wednesday I sat in bed until noon. When I finally got up, I opened my fridge, surveyed its contents, and seeing the container of leftover white rice, I decided to make Spamsilog. First, I smashed some garlic cloves and chopped them, then heated the pieces in olive oil. When the garlic turned fragrant, I dumped the old rice into the pan, breaking up chunks to make garlic rice, similar to the way Brian blogged about it . With a wooden spatula, I turned the rice over and over, pressing down on it sometimes. The longer you wait, the crispier the rice becomes — a reward for patience. A ways into the frying, I thought to add some green onions and hastily snipped a length of some that had been re-growing in a jar. As the rice cooked, I asked my spouse H to slice Spam. I always keep a can of Spam in the pantry, though I don’t eat it much these days. It’s there for emergencies. Now it felt like an emergency. As I browned the slices of Sp...

It was my third year in college and I had just experienced the most painful, hurtful breakup of my young life. I had been dating a girl for just under a year when I learned from her roommate that she had been cheating on me for almost the entire time we had been together. I had my suspicions, of course, but never any proof, not really, at least not proof I was willing to examine with any kind of depth. My heart has always been a fragile thing. Her roommate told me the last straw for her was when I had dropped by with some banh mi from the Lee's Sandwiches next to campus. It was an unplanned visit, and my girlfriend had the guy she was cheating on me with hide under the bed in her room while she took the sandwiches from me and then made an excuse as to why I needed to leave. The next day her roommate came to my place and told me what had happened. I called my girlfriend and broke up with her, and then went for one of those aimless walks reserved for those in deep pain. It ...

If you've followed me on Twitter for any length of time, you know that I am, more than anything else, the world's #1 evangelist for Shin Ramyun, the spicy Korean instant noodle. I have given more thought than is probably healthy or logical into getting a tattoo of the logo and also a tattoo of Nong Shim, the all-devouring food conglomerate that makes both Shin and other famous instant noodles like Neoguri and Chapaghetti, recently made famous in combination as the portmanteau of japaguri by  Parasite . I am also the #1 proponent of putting a slice or two (or recently during quarantine, five) of Kraft singles onto said noodles. I even wrote a whole column about it at Catapult for my  Bad Kimchi  column there. But! I wanted today to talk about how you can make an even more ridiculous bowl of Shin Ramyun, one that will warm and destroy your heart in equal measures and also give you about 3,000x times your daily recommended amount of sodium, because who cares anymore. ...