Happy New Year!! Hope everyone's wishes and goals have come true for the year of 2008.
I can't believe it's already 2009... and I thought year of 2000 sounded so weird back then.

Usually Koreans celebrate the same day as Chinese New Year. We count lunar calendar also. However, since most Korean in the States get their time off during the New Year's day and not the Chinese/Korean New Year, we just started to celebrate according to American Calendar (But, we still celebrate our own little Chinese/Korean New year too.)

So back to food! First of all, this was our New Year's Day Brunch...little heavy huh?? Hah Hah.

Let me explain little bit more about each dish now. After the introduction we will post each recipe in the very near future. Alright here we go!


The main dish you've gotta eat is Dduk Gook or Dduk Mandu Gook. Dduk=Rice Cake, Mandu=dumpling or gyoza, Gook=soup/broth. So basically it's rice cake and dumpling soup. I didn't get a quite good picture...I was too hungry... and was in the middle of eating it. Korean markets sell sliced Dduk in a bag and you can always buy frozen Mandu or make your own from our future mandu recipe (I promise I'll post this year! hah hah).

Next up, Namool (vegetable salads) series. Roughly, all of them gets cooked very lightly in boiling water, get drained, and mixed with scallions, ground garlic, sesame seeds, and sesame oil. And when you just combine all these Namool, rice, hot pepper paste, and some sesame oil and you have Bibimbap! You can eat these Namool separately as banchan or as bibimbap altogether. You tell me what you like better.

Spinach salad or Sigeumchi Namool.

Mung bean sprouts salad or Sook Joo Namool.

Type of Fern sprout salad or Gosari Namool.

These are Korean style Mung Bean Jelly called Mook but it's not sweet like American dessert jelly. It just describes how it's made. It's usually for Banchan or sidedish. If you frequented Korean Restaurant you would have seen these as one of Banchans. You make the Jelly and make special sauce with Soy sauce, sesame seeds, maybe garlic, and scallions. There are many different ways to make sauces so we'll discuss them later as well.

Alright, that's the end of PART I of our New Year's Day Brunch. We have more to come for PART II- Galbi Jjim, Boochimgae, couple of traditional drinks (non-alcoholic) and my familys special Dduk that looks like Mandu but really is a dduk. Yummy!

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Written on January 1, 2009 |