“Chef & My Fridge since 2014” (JTBC)
Jeong Dana (Guest Editor): When actress Lee Min-jung asks, “What do you do when there are no ingredients?” South Korea’s top chefs answer in unison: “You make it work.” The premise of “Chef & My Fridge since 2014” (“Chef & My Fridge”) is disarmingly simple. Acclaimed chefs are given just fifteen minutes to complete a dish using only the ingredients found inside a guest’s refrigerator. Because each guest brings their own tastes, habits, and way of life, no two refrigerators are ever the same. Comedians Kim Won-hoon and Lee Soo-ji arrive with fridges brimming with premium ingredients and fresh produce, while actor Yoo Ji-tae’s contains little more than powdered meal replacements meant for quick sustenance. Within these constraints, the chefs are tasked with challenges that verge on the absurd—such as creating a “healthy” dish out of convenience foods. In missions where open flames are forbidden, Chef Choi Hyun-seok cooks pasta dough in an electric kettle to finish a lasagna. Faced with a refrigerator stocked almost entirely with powders, Chef Kwon Sung-jun manages to produce a pesto by blending kimchi, crackers, and red leaf lettuce. Dishes that seem impossible by any conventional standard are, in the chefs’ hands, somehow made.

Yet the true center of gravity of “Chef & My Fridge” lies less in the finished dishes than in the process that leads to them. Many of the show’s chefs also gained wider recognition through Netflix’s “Culinary Class Wars,” where audiences encountered them in a far more serious light. On that series, Chef Park Eun-young approached cooking with solemn intensity; here, she gleefully shouts “Kim Poong, three strikes—you’re out!”—the playful name of her dish—while mimicking a baseball pitch to provoke writer Kim Poong. Chef Yoon Nam-no, who openly displayed his anxiety over elimination on “Culinary Class Wars,” brings forth some humor as well, bickering with Park or insisting—during a health-food challenge—that butter and fried foods can be “healthy.” While most cooking competition shows derive their drama from rigorously testing culinary expertise and judging the perfection of the final plate, “Chef & My Fridge” places its emphasis elsewhere: on the shared pleasure of competing under wildly unrealistic conditions. And that process ultimately resolves in taste. After sampling Park Eun-young’s makeshift health dish, Yoo Ji-tae remarks, “It feels comforting. I might almost tear up.” From a refrigerator that reflects an entire life, the chefs lay out a table of sincere culinary philosophy, laughter, and consolation. It is a fifteen-minute meal not easily forgotten.

*This work contains depictions that some readers may find disturbing.

“Last and First Idol” by Gengen Kusano
Baek Seolhui (Writer, Columnist): My first reaction, after finishing “Last and First Idol,” was simple: “This is insane.” The novel is undeniably monumental—a debut work that won the Seiun Award, something that had not happened in forty-two years, since 1975. And yet it reportedly drew comments such as “Something must have gone wrong if this made it to the final judging round,” and even, “The first third is a disaster.” Such extreme responses begin to make sense once one learns the book’s origin: it began life as a reworked piece of fan fiction based on “Love Live!,” pairing Nico Yazawa and Maki Nishikino.

Gengen Kusano describes his own genre as “existential widescreen yuri baroque proletarian idol hard SF.” By fusing hard science fiction with idols, mobile gacha games, and voice-actor-driven Japanese subculture, Kusano produces a novel that feels radically, even shockingly, new. Reading it, I found myself wondering when I had last loved anything with such fervor—and such excess.

Satoshi Maejima, author of “What Is the Sekai-kei?,” has described the novel as “an extension of bad otaku world-building games,” but it cannot be dismissed so easily. Who, after all, would spin out this kind of speculative imagination simply to bring together two beloved characters—and then, on that foundation, build a work of hard science fiction? Having waited a long time for its official Korean publication, I found the reading experience deeply rewarding. And once again, I find myself waiting—for the next wildly unhinged world Gengen Kusano may choose to show us.

“Seasonal Happiness” (Kim Shinji)
Kim Boksung (Writer): The “healing” genre is alive and well, but this book is something different. “Seasonal Happiness” by Kim Shinji is a series of exactly 24 short chapters—technically essays—that explore the author’s own relationship with nature and the positive impact it’s had on her life, with hopes of imparting the same outlook on the reader. The book is broadly divided into the four seasons, but each essay ruminates on one of the 24 traditional Korean seasons that make up the year. It’s hard to, say, step outside one day and decide with conviction that springtime has given way to summer, especially with climate change, but Kim shows us how breaking up four monolithic seasons into 24 incremental chunks not only gives a name to every two-week period but decodes those labels so we have things in nature to look forward to every 15 days instead of just cherry blossoms briefly once a year. And for those of us who already like to “wander” around the neighborhood, it demystifies the natural cues to be on the lookout for while waiting for less desirable weather to pass (though image search is recommended if you’re not up on your plants!). And that’s to say nothing of the surprisingly touching personal stories about the author’s own human connections. The essays begin with ipchun in February, so now’s the perfect time to follow along and practice the mindfulness homework that closes each of the 24 seasons.