Chicago coming up

Got my plane ticket and crashing on my brother's couch next week. He just had a bunch of house guests because out of town friends were visiting Lolla...oh, and another out of town friend couldn't make it and gave my brother his three-day pass. FOR FREE. So lucky =(...He enjoyed himself quite a bit, but I'm hoping my visit won't be too taxing following up an event like that.

Hammering out some restaurants I'm going to drag him too. He sounds annoyed about having to go to restaurants, and I'm not going to show him which ones because I know he'll look up the menus and complain about how expensive it is. I'd much rather just, I don't know, spring the restaurant on him so he can't protest too much if we're already sitting and looking at a menu. I know he let me take him to Blackbird last time just to humor me, but he liked it. He can't deny it.

My mom said I should make him a bunch of "banchan" before I go, but I don't know how that'll work out unless I deliberately visited a Korean store with him. I did that the last time, relying on a friend's car. Brought in a huge haul of instant curry, microwave rice, dwaenjang jjigae in a sack, etc. etc.

"Just stir-fry him some dried anchovies, that's all," my mom said. Again, not as easy as it sounds unless I visit a Korean store to buy the dried anchovies to begin with. I'll have to see if I can work that in.