I Threw Up the First Time I Ate Durian. Now I Buy It on Purpose.

 The first time I ate durian, I threw up. Not immediately, not dramatically in front of anyone, but a couple of hours later at home, and the worst part was the smell coming back up with it. That specific sweet-sulfur thing, twice. I remember lying there thinking I would never touch it again, and being slightly annoyed that my wife had loved it from the very first bite while I was the one on the bathroom floor.

I eat durian constantly now. Somewhere in the last six years, the smell stopped registering as offensive and started registering as, honestly, kind of lovely. I don't have a good explanation for how that flips. It just did. My wife, for the record, has never once let me forget that she was fine with it from day one.

The Weekend Rice Rule

Here's the thing that shaped our whole food setup here, and it's a boring logistical thing rather than a cultural one. I eat lunch and dinner at the office most weekdays. So I'm basically only eating at home on weekends. That single fact means our household grocery bill looks nothing like what you'd expect for a Korean family of four abroad.

The people actually eating at home daily are my wife, who takes lunch in some days, and our two daughters at breakfast and dinner. Three people, none of them big eaters, which sounds fine on paper and turned into a specific problem I'll get to.

Where the Kimchi Actually Comes From

We don't make baechu kimchi from scratch. That's the honest answer, and I know some people would find that disappointing. We mostly buy Bibigo, or we get a shipment air-freighted from my mother-in-law in Korea, which happens a few times a year and is genuinely better than anything you can buy here.

What my wife does make is kkakdugi and pa-kimchi. For the kkakdugi she orders Korean radish through RedMart, which is on Lazada, and it shows up reliably enough that it's become the default. Pa-kimchi she makes with local spring onions, which work fine. The gochugaru is always Korean, always sent from her parents, because the difference is genuinely noticeable and nobody in this house is willing to compromise on that particular ingredient.

The Vegetables That Kept Rotting

Here's the failure that took us embarrassingly long to fix. Korean marts here stock the shelf-stable stuff beautifully, ramyeon, gochujang, sesame oil, all of it, no problem. Fresh Korean vegetables are much harder, and you basically need to get yourself to one of the bigger Korean marts inside a major mall to find any real selection.

So we'd make the trip, buy a proper haul because who knows when we're going back, bring it all home feeling accomplished, and then throw a solid portion of it away four or five days later because it had wilted. Over and over. The problem wasn't the shopping, it was that I'd been unconsciously buying for a household of four people eating home-cooked meals every day, when the actual household eating those vegetables was three people, two of whom are children.

It took maybe two years of repeatedly binning limp vegetables before we adjusted the quantities properly. Not a dramatic realization, just a slow, mildly wasteful education.

Our Helper Learned Korean Cooking From a Book

This part I didn't expect at all. Our helper studied Korean cooking properly, from an actual Korean cookbook, working through it seriously enough that most of what our daughters eat during the week is Korean food she cooks. Not simplified versions. Actual dishes.

My wife cooks on weekends, on the helper's days off, or whenever someone wants something specific that isn't in the rotation. She's genuinely good at it, better than me by a distance, which I say with zero defensiveness because I am not a cook and have never pretended otherwise.

What that arrangement means practically is that our kids grew up eating Korean food at home almost daily, in a country where we were never going to manage that ourselves given my work hours. That wasn't a plan we made. It just emerged from someone taking the job seriously enough to study a cuisine that wasn't hers.

[사진2 들어갈자리: alt/title 텍스트 "Korean home-cooked dinner spread on family dining table"]

Kids Who Don't Really Have a Home Cuisine

Both girls have been here since they were small, and they eat basically everything, Korean, local, Western, without much preference between categories. They'll hesitate at genuinely unfamiliar things, like any kid does, and then usually eat it anyway.

I find this quietly interesting, because there's no clear "this is our food" for them the way there obviously is for me. Korean food at home is just what's for dinner. Hawker food isn't foreign or a treat, it's just what you eat when you're out. Neither one is the exotic option.

What I Fly Back With Every Time

Every trip to Korea, the return luggage is basically a supply run. Mother-in-law's kimchi, always. Korean snacks for the kids. And then the genuinely unglamorous stuff, toothbrushes, toothpaste, children's fever medicine, kitchen tools, the divided meal trays kids eat off.

You can buy all of that here. The issue is the price and the sourcing. The equivalent Korean-brand items in Singapore malls run maybe two to three times what they cost in Korea, and a lot of the cheaper local equivalents are imported from China. I'm not making some grand claim about quality across the board. I'm saying that as a Korean parent, I trust the Korean-made version of my kid's fever medicine more, and I'd rather carry it in a suitcase than think about it.

Bak Kut Teh Took Longer Than Durian

The other food I couldn't handle initially was bak kut teh. Something about the smell in certain shops, that heavy porky note that tips into gaminess if the broth isn't clean. I avoided it for a good while.

Now I eat it happily, with one caveat, it's completely restaurant-dependent. A good place has a clear peppery broth that doesn't smell like anything unpleasant at all. A bad one still hits that same note that put me off in the first place. So it wasn't really that my palate changed, more that I learned which places to walk into.

That's roughly the shape of six years of eating here. Not some clean arc of adapting to a new cuisine. Just a lot of small adjustments, some vegetables in the bin, a helper who learned to cook food from a country she'd never been to, and a fruit that made me sick once and now smells like something I'd go out of my way for. I still send my brother in Seoul a photo whenever I'm holding a particularly good one, mostly to annoy him.

Related reading:

A Local's Guide to Singapore Hawker Centres: The Places I Still Go After Nearly 10 Years

How to Buy Korean Groceries and Essential Supplies at the Lowest Prices in Singapore

Five Helpers in Four Years: What I Actually Learned About Hiring Domestic Help in Singapore