Saturday, March 12, 2011

Korean in Killeen

Having spent nearly 4 months of the last year and a half working at Fort Hood, in Killeen Texas, I finally decided to leave the safe confines of the hotel-centric chain restaurants and Target/Wal-Mart shopping centers and take a drive to historic downtown Killeen. I found pretty much what I expected to find, empty one storey store fronts, dusty unused parking spaces, and lots of lots of Hangul ... (screeching sound) ... huh?

Yep, turns out historic downtown Killeen, heartland of America, is being somewhat revitalized by Korean immigration. My favorite grocery store by far is the Korean O-Mart (not the one pictured above, btw), where I can find genuinely fresh vegetables and dumplings (as well as shitake mushrooms, plenty of seaweed for soup, and a wide array of spicy sauces that I have been eagerly experimenting with).

It was a nice lesson in American multi-linguialism.

2 comments:

Brandon C. Loudermilk said...

If you buy yourself some chicken, cabbage, onions, gochujang, and a few other things, you can make yourself some 닭갈비.

This is the recipe my own version is based on:
http://mykoreankitchen.com/2007/01/17/delicious-dakgalbi-marinated-chicken-in-spicy-sauce-version-2/

Or, if you want to go full on out, make yourself some KFC - korean fried chicken:
http://www.vietworldkitchen.com/blog/2009/07/best-korean-fried-chicken-recipe-yangnyeom-dak-.html

Chris said...

Awesome, thanks for the recipes!

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