You all went ahead and picked up some gochujang, the magical Korean chile sauce, right? Well, here's a recipe for bo ssam that you can use it with this very weekend! It's nice when life works out this way.

Our relationships with condiments can become rote: ketchup/fries, mustard/hotdog, salsa/chips—even sriracha/pho. We robotically dip, drizzle and douse without a conscious thought. In this column, we'll be trying to shake up our collective condiment consciousness. Proust wrote, "The only real voyage of discovery consists in not seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes," and with that in mind, I thought I'd take you along in search of lost time—to my first condiment: Gochujang.

As a Korean kid growing up in American Samoa, I was part of a subculture made up of the families of Korean fishermen and sailors that had sprung up around the tuna industry of the South Pacific. [...]