ears eyes nose [tail]

A few weeks ago I wrote about our first experience making Beebimbop.  I mentioned that we had shopped at all of our local grocery stores and couldn’t get our hands on gochujang, the Korean condiment that accompanies this dish.  A few days later I got a phone call from my father-in-law.  He was with my mother-in-law at an Asian supermarket a stone’s throw from their home.  They had asked an employee to help them find gochujang, and found out there are many varieties of this condiment.  The employee proceeded to help them choose three types that would be appropriate for Beebimbop.  My father-in-law was checking to make sure that was okay.  He said they would put the bottles in the mail.  Sure enough the package arrived a few days after this conversation.

Of course we are happy to have the right sauce for this dish.  It truly will make it taste better the next time we make it.  But that is not what inspired me to write about this today.  I really just wanted to get a chance to publicly thank them for taking the time to go someplace that they wouldn’t normally go and learn about our son’s birth culture in this small (but big) way.  It just really meant a lot to me.  As I have mentioned before, I am learning along the way what it means to be a Korean-American family.  My parents-in-law somehow showed me that it doesn’t take much to value all parts of that three-word phrase simultaneously.  How did they get so smart?