Belated feast post

It was just two weeks ago, but somehow that seems a long time - in any case, this kind of feast could not go without reportage. Kate's best friend from Southbank Lisa (ok, big parenthetical coming here, as I was going to link back to the Legoland birthday trip from this summer, to which Kate was allowed one guest, and of course that was Lisa, only to find that like a very crap court reporter, I never even posted the trip - sigh) and her family came over for a Korean food blowout by AYJ Kim and then lots of playing. Kate had some great friends at Southbank, and we all miss Lisa (and her big sister Mona) but hopefully we'll be able to keep up some kind of intermittent social contacts with them like this one.

I'm also very pleased that Lisa's dad brought his camera along, as our batteries went dead at the crucial moment, and he was good enough to capture this shot of the girls and at least some of the regiment's worth of food that Alice prepared.
You're looking - left to right - at Abby, Lisa behind, Kate, Manami (mom) and Mona, and the food in the same order is just one of three serving dishes worth of bulgogi, that enormous bowl of chapchae, and two different bokums - one with beef and one kimchi. I was only helpful as totally unintelligent assistance, but I did manage to do things like strain noodles, plug in the rice cooker, and wash lettuce leaves so that Alice could keep working on all the mains. We all made very laudable efforts at consumption, but the sheer amount of food was beyond us, even including some help from Jay and I-chan, who thankfully were there too to help with Japanese translation, since Manami - while her English is quite good - is more comfortable (sorry for the blinding flash of the obvious - who isn't?) in her native tongue. Even though Mona and I had a pretty nice rhythm going with the leaf-wrapped bulgogi burritos, the Kim-Granholms enjoyed leftover beef and chapchae for a good bit of the week following. After a lovely dessert courtesy of our guests, the four girls ran off to play all over the house, and while there was a bit of kerfuffle when Kate and Lisa excluded the littlest one for a time, that was settled first when Mona kindly agreed to read Abby some of her favorite books and than later when I intervened and asked the two of them to let Abby into their secret hideout in (and I'm not making this up) the bathroom in the basement. Thankfully, Furukawa-san got some evidence of that too, as you see here:
While the three of them played (and read - I think they went through good chunks of Beatrix Potter's oeuvre and one or two more collections of quite young kids' stuff (both Kate and Lisa were reading to Abs) the 'adults' (and I use the quotes deliberately because probably Mona at age 11 owns clearest title to that name) went upstairs to compete on Wii Sports. The good/bad news was that our guest (Furukawa-san) beat all comers at bowling - that was very hospitable of me, I thought, but the bad bit there is that I was trying as hard as I could not to let it happen. We ran the gamut of sports, including some four-person doubles tennis and even a little mother-daughter boxing match between Manami and Mona. It was incredibly sweet that Mona actually looked a bit stricken after the match - I mean, she had knocked out the woman who bore her, after all. This photo (our camera was charged back up again) shows the three guests, with Mona chipping in Wii Golf...
and I'm really not joking about the bathroom playing. 90 minutes later, the three younger girls were all still down there, even on a rather cold November day - the only concession they'd made was to bring down some blankets to create (of course) a cozy nest. To wit:
Anyway, it was a triumph, and while I'm not stupid enough to get into any kind of inevitably self-destructive comparisons between Kim generations in the cooking sphere, I did very promptly get on the phone afterwards to tell jang mo nim that she certainly would have been proud to be there at the table and watch her second daughter work. Thanks, Al.