Winter Camp Lunch, Week One

It’s time for winter camp which means…

Camp Lunches!

Instead of one big post, I’m going to be posting about our lunches weekly.

This camp, I’m teaching the lowest level camp students. As it’s their first time even being able to attend camp, they are super energetic and already having a blast.

The first camp lunch was a “special” lunch. I had a peek at their lunch menu and it’s broken down into three types of lunches: special lunches, traditional Korean lunchboxes (한식 도시락) , and “kids” lunches which are the cute (and not very filling) lunches.

It’s something of a joke that when schools give pasta as a main dish, they still give rice, doubling up on the carbohydrates. I mentioned that they didn’t give us a side of rice this time, and my friend reminded me that there is rice in the kimbap and yubuchobap. I’m okay with this, as long as it isn’t an entire portion of rice.

For the first camp lunch, we had pasta and marinara sauce, some fried and sauced chicken (soy? orange?), yubuchobap 유부초밥 (fried rice inside a pocket of seasoned tofu), Korean carbonara tteokbokki 까르보나라떡볶이, two pieces of MyChew chewy candy (grape and strawberry), a mini corndog, four slices of spam and cucumber kimbap, and fish cake soup 어묵국.

I had to ask one of my camp kids what the carbonara tteokbokki was, because I couldn’t place it. It had mini sausages in it as well as tteokbokki, but the sauce was white and creamy, somewhat cheesy but also very mild. He wrote “까르보” in my planner and after I read it aloud, I asked, “Carbonara?” Turns out carbonara tteokbokki is a common Italian-Korean fusion dish, often with bacon added.

I ate everything except the soup, because I really don’t like fish cake. I also had to fight to keep my MyChew from two of my older students who saw it on my desk later in the day and demanded I give it to them. 8/10

Something about our second day of camp being on a Saturday (our one Saturday camp day) made my students ravenous. One student was telling me he was hungry before the first class even ended, and in the last class before lunch, one of my students started a “Lun-chi Ti-em *clap clap clap-clap-clap*” chant.

When we finally wrapped up and I told them to go wash their hands, my boss caught me in the hallway and broke the bad news–lunch was going to be late. I had to corral my students back into my classroom and thankfully, they wanted to listen to a song about space they had seen pop up after we sang our good morning song.

Saturday’s lunch was a traditional Korean lunchbox featuring myulchi bokkeum 멸치볶음 (dried anchovies), a piece of jello with pineapple inside, rice, gyeranmari 계란말이 (a piece of rolled egg omelet), a piece of meat, three chicken nuggets, japchae 잡채 (glass noodles and thinly sliced vegetables, one of my favorite Korean foods), bulgogi 불고기 with sliced vegetables, and fish cake soup again. 7/10

Monday’s lunch was another traditional Korean lunchbox, although it strangely had the samgyeopsal 삼겹살 (pork belly), fish cake soup, and rice packaged separately.

It had a salad with some sort of lemon vinaigrette, kimchi, corn salad with macaroni, two quail eggs, sliced peppers and garlic, a kind of soy dipping sauce, and ssamjang 쌈장, a spicy garlic dipping sauce.

As much as I do like samgyeopsal, getting it in a lunchbox is a completely different experience than having it freshly grilled and still warm. The quality of samgyeopsal in lunchboxes is also much lower than that at barbecue restaurants. 5/10

Our lunch before the winter vacation was another Korean lunchbox. It featured rice, bulgogi, yeongeun jorim 연근조림 (braised lotus root), bean sprouts, white kimchi (more mild and far less spicy than regular kimchi), an omelet roll, sliced sausages in a tomato sauce, and a piece of fish with some tartar sauce. I ate everything for this lunch except for the few pieces of mushrooms that were hiding under the sliced sausages. I love braised lotus root and wish there had been more. 8/10