This trip happens about once a year, and every single time the lady at the cash register would frown and scold me about how I need to eat something healthier.

We had it in a Korean restaurant.  It came in a seafood jigae (a spicy hot soup that I order with most of my Korean meals).  Looked like brain to us, and when we asked the waiter, we were told of fish eggs.

Sure.  Sounded reasonable.  It had that flavorless, dry, sandy texture that resembled some type of roe/caviar that we had before.  Neither of us were big fan of fish eggs or these brain-looking fish “eggs”, even though we knew it had to be some sort of rare delicacy that came with a high price tag (and cholestrol).

A year and a half later, I learned that it wasn’t exactly fish egg.  It was sperm.  Codfish sperm.

Wow.  Hmm.  I guess in functionality and nutrition values, sperm and egg aren’t that different.  One comes from half of the fish population… and the other comes from the other half.  If the restaurant served such a delicacy there was no way the fobbish Korean-speaking waiter could’ve really mistakened for what it was.  Perhaps he didn’t want to tell the truth because it might scare us?  Perhaps ”eating sperm” just doesn’t sound very appropriate…

On a related note, we had this sperm-contaminated jigae in one of the best Korean restaurants we’ve ever tried, at one of the most unlikely places to find such authentic Asian cuisine: Las Vegas Strip right north of Wynn.  The food, service, and interior decor were all top-notch, although the restaurant was kinda cheap about taking down the exterior signs from the previous tenent of the retail space:

We still call it the “Kimchi Sports World”.

I made this Shan brand of Malay Chicken Biryani for dinner.  Once again, nothing from this brand could be cooked in under two hours, but it’s all good because each batch is enough to feed a small country’s Olympics team.

The problem with cooking a cuisine that you’re not familiar with is that you have to buy a lot of random ingredients just to be used once.  That increases the cost of the meal significantly.  Yeah I still have bags of wheat and barley and chana dal sitting around.  To finish them I’ll have to cook enough Haleem Masala to fill an Olympics swimming pool.  Pictured below are garlic paste, ginger paste, tamarind concentrate, and ghee.

Pictured below are ghee, chicken, onions, chilis, and curry leaves.  The great thing about living in New York is that you could indeed find stuff like ghee… the awesome purified butter.  The whole jar went into the cooking.

Here’s the final product!  Served with mango juice.