Celebration banquet or why do you always eat Chinese food when you are in Korea?

Whenever we do an installation in Korea we host a celebration dinner at the end to celebrate our joint Korean-American success.  This year we had to do it on my second night in Taean because the big boss would be gone at the time we actually finished acceptance testing.  So here is what we had (compare and contrast to last year and I'll try to keep the courses in order.  Oh, and this year I was not the target.

Kevin and Matt, two of my engineers at the table before all the Koreans arrive.  As the night happened, Matt was sort of the target but the night was relatively somber because of the nationwide morning for the sailors on the Cheonan (google it).  I say relatively somber, because one of the Koreans did threaten to kiss him at one point.  Back to the meal.

First course, Jellyfish in the center, prawn with a sweet sauce at bottom, duck with a tangy sause on right, not really sure what on left (it had a ketchupy tasting sauce and was somewhat firm to the tooth, but no idea what it was, it did not scream fish OR fowl, but was probably one or the other) and "Thousand Year Old" egg at top.  All good (didn't eat the parsley).

Seond course, seafood and mushrooms in a shark fin sauce. Also good.  To drink there is the soju shot glass (don't drink to the bottom if you don't want it refilled) on right and Jasmine-like tea on left and bottle of Crown Royal in center top.

Vegetables and bean sprouts in yet another red sauce.  The long red pepper is not a bell pepper, but a korea hot pepper.  Moist towelette on right (apparently I committed a faux pas by not using it at the beginning of the meal).

Sorry for the bad photo, but this is "Red and White" Prawns.  It is just two huge fried prawns, the one on the left in a sweet white sauce, almost like gravy, and the one on the right in a spicy red sauce.  This is the first chinese food that Matthew ever cooked for the family 3 or 4 years ago.

Sweet bits of pork fried lightly and tossed in another sauce (this one the most like what Americans get in Sweet and Sour) with veggies on lettuce.  Notice the bottle of Crown is gone, now.

Vegetables cooked in a Korean spicy sauce, pretty hot.  What you do is you use your chopsticks (if you read the older parts of the blog you should be surprised that these are plastic chopsticks) to pick off a fold of the sweet bun on the left and then put some of the veggies on that, wrap it and eat it like a burrito (well a teeny-tiny burrito) it is almost completely unlike eating moo-shu.  Notice that beer has joined the soju and whiskey in the alcohol pantheon for the night.

I thought this was desert.  It was a sweet ball of fried dough thickly encrusted with sesame seeds.  That doesn't quite describe it, but it was memorably good.

It turns out we had to order a main course.  I did not understand this, even though one of my Korean friends tried to explain it (basically you get all those previous course as a set up to the main dish which you order off a menu that the waitress didn't bring and would have been in Korean anyway so everybody just go noodles, apparently at random), so I ended up with egg drop noodles which tasted just like you would imagine.

Daniel, the best english speaker of the Koreans, got the hot seafood noodles.

Matt, the pseudo-target, got his favorite dish Black Bean Noodles.  We eat this at lunch 3 or 4 times in every 2 week trip and this trip was no exception, so you can probably guess what we had for lunch that day.

And for desert we had a foamy creme thing that tasted sweet and very, very airy.

Happy Korean engineers.  Brown bottles are beer, Green bottles are soju, except for the square green one in the bottom center which is an evil Chinese Whiskey that makes you wish for the delicate flavor of Mekong.