Happy New Year!!

It seems appropriate to start this blog with the Korean New Year. Over the next year (or more) I hope to capture my experiences with Korean food - both through learning to cook it and through eating it both at home and at various restaurants in the Bay Area.

We decided to celebrate the Lunar New Year with the traditional Korean New Years dish - ttok kuk. This is a pretty simple dish that is basically a broth with rice noodles.

For the broth I did the following (double batch so I have leftovers to measure and freeze):

• Mince the white part of a handful of green onions and several cloves of garlic.
• Sautee in a few tablespoons of vegetable oil for about 2 minutes.
• Add a few soup bones and cook for about two minutes - browning each side. (it is helpful to soak the soup bones for an hour or more before doing this - the first time I made this I let them soak overnight and didn't have to skim anything off the top.)
• Add 4T Soy Sauce, 2T Rice Wine, 2T Sesame Oil and let cook for a few minutes.
• Add 12 C water and bring to a boil - skim the foam off of the top.
• Let simmer for 45 minutes or more and strain.

You soak the rice noodles before putting them in the soup. Mine were fresh so I only soaked them 10 minutes.

For the soup itself

• Take 8 cups of broth and bring to a boil.
• In a separate pan fry some minced garlic with vegetable oil.
• Add about 1/2 lb of meat of your choice thinly sliced (I just used ground beef for this batch) and cook until just done.
• Chop up some thin slices of green onion for garnish.
• Cut the rest of about 6 green onions in 1/4" slices and add to the broth after it's at a boil.
• Let the broth simmer for 10 minutes and then add the rice noodles.
• Cook the rice noodles for 10 minutes or until the right texture (soft but not too soft.) With fresh noodles, this will take less than 10 minutes.
• Ladle into soup bowls and top with the meat and green onions.

This recipe was more or less taken from: Growing Up in a Korean Kitchen: A Cookbook by Hi Sooshin Hepinstall.

In addition to the ttok kuk, we had another kind of ttok (my husband thinks paht ttok) which is similar to Japanese mochi - as you can see we couldn't wait to start eating them so there are a few missing...