comments on costco, crockpots, chili, chips and cheese

Once in a couple of months or so, Ken and I try to head to Costco in Daegu. You can find alot of staples that you usually can't find here - or that you can find here but the price is doubled. Brenda and I decided to head for Daegu, which is around 2 1/2 hours away, one day recently. Brenda's husband picked Ken up for work so that I could have the car. We had a GPS from the office in it with Costco programmed in, so we felt pretty good about finding our way. We actually made it there with only 2 turn arounds, which is pretty good.

I bought a crockpot. A staple in Ken's diet is chili (especially when I am not here). He mainly like to make "nuclear nachos" out of the chili. Nuclear nachos is basically chili and grated cheese over tortilla chips. He used to order this at a restaurant in Norman, Oklahoma, when he was in college there. For some reason, the name stuck and we call this concoction nuclear nachos. Anyway, Ken also does not like kidney beans in his chili. He prefers pinto beans. So we try to bring a few cans of Ranch Style Beans back to Korea with us whenever we go to Texas. I also have brought back some dried beans on occasion to make a pot of beans. Ken came up with the idea of making beans to go into the chili so that we didn't have to bring cans of beans in our suitcases. So when I saw this crock pot, I decided to buy it to make beans. It is a Rival crockpot and it was packaged in an English language box. The only difference is the plug - so that we can use it here without a transformer. However, I got a kick out of the packaging. First of all, the instruction are entirely in Korean.
Fortunately I know how to turn a crockpot on to Low, High or Warm. But it made me think about the instructions of objects you buy in the U.S. The instruction booklets are sometimes huge because they have everything written in English, Spanish, French, and a myriad of other languages. However, I have never noticed that Korean is in that list. Maybe they are paying us back by printing their instructions in their country only in Korean. It makes sense.

I also thought the enclosed cookbook was pretty interesting.
They have it divided into Korean food, Chinese food and Western food. The Korean food section had the usual Korean mixtures of chicken, veggies, seafood, etc.













And the usual dishes with an egg on top.






And the usual dish with red chili paste.








And all the soups had cute little garnishes on top.




But my favorite dish was in the Western Food Section.


Who would have ever guessed that you could make a pot pie in a crockpot?

Back to Costco. I bought my usual supply of ground beef, cheddar cheese (for only $9 instead of $15), tortilla chips and lunch meat. We were the only foreigners in the place, probably since it was a weekday. We also had the biggest baskets of food. I chucked two big bags of peanut M&M's into the basket for Ken and had 2 Korean ladies eye me, then turn to their other two friends, say something, and then all of them turned and stared into my basket. It is so frustrating to not be able to say "I only come here 3 times a year, so I stock up" or "I have 10 children at home - I give each of them 2 M&M's a day" or something of that sort. But I just smiled at them.

For some reason, we couldn't get the lady to talk on the GPS. But we made it home with zero turn arounds. And the guys were excited that we had food and that they didn't have to go. Brenda and I decided that next time we would explore some of the area around Costco. Daegu is known for making textiles and we saw some interesting looking buildings we could try out before we stock up on cheese and chips.