Chicken and Rice Soup

Second week in Korea. I've been here for ten days and I've eaten approximately forty meals and each one has been a lesson. Not a cooking lesson — a belonging lesson. Every meal I eat in Korea teaches me something about the gap between my version and the original, and the gap is not what I expected. My food is not worse than Korean food. It's different. It's Korean-American food — Korean ingredients filtered through an American kitchen, an American palate, an American loneliness that adds a flavor all its own. The food here is Korean-Korean: unburdened, uncomplicated, made without the weight of reclamation or the need to prove anything. The ajumma making kimchi jjigae at a tiny restaurant in Mapo-gu doesn't think about identity when she cooks. She just cooks. The just is what I'm learning. The just is what I don't have yet.

Mina took me to her jjigae place — a hole-in-the-wall in Yeonnam-dong with four tables and a halmeoni who has been making the same three jjigae for forty years. I ordered kimchi jjigae. It arrived in a stone pot, bubbling, red, and the first spoonful was — I don't have the word. Not better than mine. Not worse. Deeper. Wider. Made with kimchi that has been fermenting in onggi pots for months, maybe years, in a climate that is Korea's climate, with water that is Korea's water. The terroir again. The sense of place that no recipe can capture. I ate the whole bowl and ordered another, and the halmeoni looked at me with that approving Korean grandmother look — the look that says "you eat well, good girl" — and I thought: she doesn't know I'm adopted. She doesn't know I learned to cook from YouTube. She just sees a Korean woman eating her jjigae with enthusiasm. And that's enough. That's everything.

We traveled to Busan on Thursday — KTX train, two and a half hours, the Korean countryside unrolling outside the window like a scroll painting: rice paddies, mountains, small towns, the green intensity of Korea in September. Busan is different from Seoul — warmer, saltier, the ocean everywhere, the dialect different (Mina warned me about the Busan accent, which she said is "like Korean with the volume turned up"). The Airbnb in Haeundae is two blocks from the beach, and the first thing I did was walk to the water and stand with my feet in the Pacific and think: the same ocean that separates me from Seattle is the same ocean I grew up beside. The Pacific is mine on both sides.

Jagalchi Fish Market was everything Karen said it would be and more. An entire building of seafood — live octopus, abalone, sea squirt, crabs, fish I can't name — and the second floor is restaurants where they'll cook whatever you buy downstairs. Daniel and I bought a live crab and two kinds of sashimi and took them upstairs and the woman cooked the crab into a spicy stew and served the sashimi with soy sauce and wasabi and perilla leaves, and the freshness — seafood pulled from the ocean that morning, cooked minutes ago — was on another level. I wrote in Karen's journal: "The fish market is incredible, Mom. You were right. I ate a crab that was alive thirty minutes ago. I wish you could see this."

I also ate something I never expected: dwaeji gukbap — Busan's signature dish, a milky pork bone soup with rice, the local comfort food. It's served at stalls and restaurants all over the city, cheap and filling and deeply savory. The broth is white from hours of boiling pork bones, the meat tender, the rice soaking up the broth. I ate it at a stall near the fish market, sitting on a plastic stool, surrounded by Korean workers on their lunch break, and nobody looked at me because I was invisible, because I was Korean in Korea, because my face was the default face, and the invisibility was freedom.

Daniel and I talk every night on the Airbnb balcony about what we're feeling. He said, "I thought coming to Korea would feel like coming home. It doesn't. It feels like visiting a home I could have had." I understand. This is not home — home is Seattle, home is my condo, home is Karen's Bellevue kitchen. But this is the place home could have been, the alternate-universe home, the unlived-life home. And visiting it — eating its food, hearing its language, walking its streets — doesn't replace the home I have. It expands it. My home is bigger now. My kitchen is bigger now. My identity is bigger now. Korea didn't replace anything. It added to everything.

I’ve been home from Korea for two weeks now, and the dish I keep chasing in my own kitchen is the one I almost didn’t order — the dwaeji gukbap I ate on that plastic stool in Busan, surrounded by workers on lunch break who didn’t look twice at me. That milky, slow-simmered broth with rice soaking into every corner of the bowl felt like permission: to be invisible, to just eat, to just be. I can’t replicate the pork bone broth or Korea’s water or forty years of a halmeoni’s muscle memory — but this chicken and rice soup is my version of that same reaching-toward feeling: simple, honest, and made without the need to prove anything.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 45 minutes | Total Time: 1 hour | Servings: 6

Ingredients

1 1/2 lbs bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs (about 4 thighs)
8 cups low-sodium chicken broth
2 cups water
3/4 cup uncooked long-grain white rice
3 medium carrots, peeled and sliced into rounds
3 stalks celery, sliced
1 medium yellow onion, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon neutral oil (such as avocado or vegetable)
1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1/2 teaspoon ground white pepper
1 teaspoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
2 green onions, thinly sliced (for garnish)
Fresh parsley or cilantro, chopped (optional garnish)

Instructions

Build the broth. In a large Dutch oven or heavy pot, combine the chicken thighs, chicken broth, and water. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, skimming off any foam that rises to the surface. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer uncovered for 25 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through and the broth has deepened.
Pull and shred the chicken. Remove the chicken thighs with tongs and set aside to cool slightly. Once cool enough to handle, remove and discard the skin and bones. Shred the meat into rough, generous pieces and set aside. Reserve all the broth in the pot.
Sauté the aromatics. In a separate skillet, heat the neutral oil over medium heat. Add the onion and cook for 4–5 minutes until softened. Add the garlic and cook for 1 minute more until fragrant. Transfer the onion and garlic into the reserved broth pot.
Add vegetables and rice. Bring the broth back to a gentle boil. Add the carrots, celery, and rice. Stir in the salt, white pepper, and soy sauce. Reduce heat to medium-low and cook for 18–20 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the rice is tender and the vegetables are soft. The rice will thicken the broth into something milky and deeply comforting — this is exactly what you want.
Finish and season. Return the shredded chicken to the pot. Stir in the sesame oil. Taste and adjust salt as needed. Let everything simmer together for 3–5 minutes so the flavors come together.
Serve. Ladle into deep bowls. Top with sliced green onions and fresh herbs if using. Serve hot, immediately — the rice continues to absorb the broth as it sits, which is not a problem. It only gets more satisfying.

Nutrition (per serving)

Chicken and Rice Soup — My Homesick Busan Bowl