June 2022

Recently, I wrote a recipe article about the Lowcountry shrimp boil! As someone from Savannah, Georgia, I grew up eating many shrimp boils over the summers during my youth and early adulthood. Rarely did people need an excuse to get together over some shrimp! Inevitably, people were left with leftovers to put into the refrigerator. Over time, my family came up with our favorite ways to eat the leftovers. Below, I list easy ideas for how to use the leftovers if you decide to make a Lowcountry shrimp boil at home! 

You may have heard of chestnuts. Or, maybe you have eaten macadamia nuts…but have you ever tried ginkgo nuts? In the United States, we eat all sorts of seeds that we call ‘nuts,’ but never eat those from the ginkgo tree. In many East Asian countries, ginkgo nuts are a traditional ingredient used in traditional cooking. Often, in China, people use these nuts as an ingredient in congee. In Japan, people use them in dishes such as chawanmushi, a steamed egg custard dish in a pot. In South Korea, people add them to dishes in the autumn months and eat them on skewers. Here, we discuss ginkgo nuts in Korean cooking as well as answer some questions you may have about this ingredient. 

Based on my ingredient articles about acorn starch and dandelion greens, you may notice that people in Korea eat ingredients that, though readily available wildly in the United States, we rarely eat. Chrysanthemum greens are no exception! While we enjoy looking at these beautiful flowers during the fall and spring months, people in South Korea also harvest them as a cooking ingredient. In this article, we discuss this ingredient in-depth. Let’s get started! 

Probably one of the most uniquely Korean ingredients available on the market is acorn starch. Unique to the Korean culture, people use this starch to make one of the most historically significant dishes in South Korea known as ‘dotorimuk’ (도토리묵). Here, we will discuss the ingredient in detail in preparation for making dotorimuk in the future!