Year of the Rooster

Lunar New Year sunrise! It's nice this time of year, when sunrise happens during breakfast. And Doug made us pancakes, so that was an extra treat.



I recently found out about Tacoma Rocks, where people paint rocks and hide them in parks or other places (I found one outside Fircrest Children's Dental). Through that group I learned about Monkeyshines, which has been going on since 2004 but I'd never heard of it before. In the Year of the Monkey, a group of glass artists in Tacoma made some little treasures to hide around town. Sort of like an Easter egg hunt for lunar new year. (This is not a traditional Lunar New Year activity, but was envisioned as something fun to help chase away the gray winter blahs.) They continued it through one full cycle (12 years) and have started another. So I decided to take Kate out in the morning and hunt for a rooster treasure. We went to the Chinese Reconciliation park, down on the waterfront.



We did not find any Monkeyshines or any painted rocks, but we had a good time. There were other people out looking too, so I imagine if there was anything there it was found earlier. It's too bad we didn't know about this last year, since Kate was born in the Year of the Monkey.  That would have been fun.



Kate says, "If you want to find a rock, you have to think like a rock!"



The lions were vandalized last year. They were carved with balls in their mouths, and someone broke them to get the balls out.



We spotted this seal poking his head out of the water. (Not an uncommon sight around here, but this one had his head up for an unusually long time.)



Sleeping heron.



We stopped by the block fountain downtown (which was not fountaining). Didn't find anything there either.



We got home in time to make ddeok guk for lunch. In Korea you eat this on Lunar New Year to get a year older. (In the morning I said to Kate, "Hey, you're fourteen in Korean age now!" and she said, "No, I'm only thirteen because I haven't eaten ddeok guk yet!") I have blogged about this before where I spelled it dduk, but ddeok is more in keeping with the current romanization system. Or tteok. Here's a video about it.

Two things you should know about ddeok guk: (A) it's very filling, and (B) it doesn't make good leftovers (the ddeok goes all mushy and slimy). So you don't want to make a lot more than you can eat at once. I was planning to take some over to Anne Marie (for her daughter Kaela), and in my enthusiasm I bought the BIG bag of ddeok. I ended up with rather more than I needed, even for two families. So then I had to find someone else to share it with. Next time I'll make a bit less.

새해복 많이 받으세요!

Lunar New Year

I made this card to send to some friends in Korea. (Hopefully they won't mind getting it a little late!)

I wanted to get some dduk guk, but with the weather lately I hadn't prepared anything.  Monday was wonderfully sunny and even warm (relatively), which was lovely after all the snow and ice.  So I called Doug, when he was done with his classes, and asked if he'd like to have lunch in Lakewood.  We arranged to meet at Chung Ki Wa.




Doug had chicken bulgogi, and I got my dduk guk for the year.  It was a big bowl with lots of dduk.  Very dense.  I was feeling pretty full afterwards. 

The best part was that while I was driving down I had the thought that we should get some kim (laver seaweed) for Andy to have with his rice.  I figured Doug was closer than I was, so I called his cell phone and asked, "Could you stop by Paldo World and get some more kim?" and he said, "I already did."  Isn't he awesome?

It's the year of the dragon.  My brother Peter is a dragon!  새해복 많이 받으세요!

Hoppy New Year!

Get it? It's the year of the rabbit. (Hee hee)

Doug, Andy, and I went down to O Bok Jip and I got some dduk guk for lunch, so I could be a year older. (You can see my previous post about dduk guk here.)



It was pretty tasty. (The way I make it is a bit different, but also tasty!)



I brought along two packages of kim, and Andy gobbled them both up. Yum!



Our neighbor Hyun Ju gave us a hanbok that used to belong to her daughter Sky (하누리). After Kate got home from school I asked her if she'd like to put it on and take some pictures.



공주 케이트.

It was so funny watching Kate suddenly doing the princess thing. She's always been more into the dragons and dinosaurs. I think this may be the first time she's actually played dress-up in a dress. She was just having a ball. (After taking pictures we played Kingdom, and I was the dragon.)



Here's what the hat looks like in the back. (The hat was just a little too big and kept sliding down to her eyes.)



Kate's idea of posing. Cheese!



새해복 많이 받으세요!

New Year's Blessings

Sunday, in addition to being Valentine's Day, was also the Lunar New Year. On Saturday we went with some friends to an activity at the Korean (church) branch in Federal Way. (They used to meet in Auburn, but moved.)

There are quite a lot of Koreans around here. I do occasionally work up the nerve to strike up a conversation in public (I met a nice family at the library once), but it's difficult. ("Hey! I don't know you, but I see that you're Korean! I want to talk to you!") 쑥스럽다. So I was looking forward to doing some Korean schmoozing, as I'd put it, in a no-pressure setting. Well, we didn't exactly have people running over to talk to us (the random Americans crashing the party), and I realized that if I wanted to meet anyone I was going to have to make the first move. (There were a few people there that I'd met before, so we weren't going into it completely cold.)

In remembering my mission lately, I've been thinking a lot about my Korean companions. I did send 설날 cards to a couple of them, but haven't heard anything back yet. So I was especially interested in talking to the Korean missionaries serving in the branch. There's a Korean sister and an elder, and their American companions, who travel all over the Seattle mission working with the Korean people in the area.

Well, I met Sister Kim and Elder Min, and it turns out they're both from my mission area! Sister Kim (김훈지) is from Gwangju (농성 ward, which is where Sister O'Bryan is serving right now) and Elder Min (didn't get the rest of his name) is from Daejeon 선화 ward. I told him I'd served there, and he said, "So who do you know?" and I just kind of went "Uhhhh..." Nope, can't remember any names. That was seventeen years ago! (I did remember a couple of names, later, but probably not anyone that he would know.) I neglected to ask if there was any chance I would have met him as a four-year-old.

Sister Kim was very sweet. I went over to talk to her, holding Andy, and she said, "Oh, baby!" and took him from me, exclaiming over how cute he was. Then I asked her where she was from and she said "Gwangju," and I just grabbed her hand and said, "자매님! That was my greenie area!" I told her all about how I've been thinking about Korea a lot lately, and practicing the language and trying to get in touch with old companions. (She said my Korean was very good.) I got her email address, so I can write to her after she goes home in April.

There was a lot of food at the activity (but no dduk guk) and some amusing jump-roping. We had to leave early because Kate was bored and cranky (and we wanted to give her a little time to decompress before bed.) I'd like to attend church there some Sunday, but I'm afraid it wouldn't be very interesting for Kate.

Rat cake!

Last night we celebrated our friend Scott's 60th birthday (which was actually on Tuesday). He lived in Japan for ten years, so I thought it would be fun to get him a Year of the Rat cake. He was born in the year of the Earth Rat, and after cycling through the rest of the five elements, the Earth Rat year has come around again. It's a big deal.

I got the cake made at Fred Meyer, using their "picture a cake" thing where you take in a photo (or other picture) and they somehow magically apply it to the top of a cake in edible form. I created the design with one of my digi rats, and the kanji for "sixty years" down the side. (As it turns out, that may not have been the most authentic way to phrase it, but I couldn't find an answer in time, so I just went with that.)



Scott with his cake! I asked him what kind of cake he liked and he said carrot, so it was a carrot rat cake.



Lighting the candles. I didn't catch the moment of blowing out.



Kate helps take the candles out afterward.



Lucky has his eye on the cake.



He didn't get any.



Lucky looks festive.



Scott gets a kiss. Happy birthday!

Eating your age

Kimberly in China recently posted on her blog about the Chinese age system. The year that you're born is your first year, and your age goes up at each new year. (They do celebrate their birthdays but they don't get older on their birthdays.) They do it the same way in Korea, and there's also a food tradition involved.

Dduk (sounds a lot like "duck," with what's called a "tense" d at the beginning) is rice cake made with glutinous rice flour. It comes in a lot of different forms. One form is little white oval-shaped pieces, that are cooked in soup called dduk guk. This is the traditional dish for the lunar new year in Korea. They say that when you eat dduk guk on the lunar new year, you get a year older. They call it eating age. (This of course leads to the expected jokes, like "So if I don't eat it I won't get any older?" and "What happens if I have two bowls?")

So yesterday I made dduk guk, and I thought I'd share the recipe here.



You probably won't be able to find dduk outside of a Korean grocery store, but if you're lucky enough to have one in the area, this is what it looks like. (Packaging varies.) The stores around here keep it near the produce section.

Other ingredients are:

beef (thinly sliced, if you can get it)
beef broth
garlic
green onion
soup soy sauce (called 국간장, or regular soy sauce in a pinch)
sesame oil
black pepper
eggs

I have this cookbook called A Korean Mother's Cooking Notes that explains how to boil some beef brisket with garlic and green onion for two hours. I didn't do that. I just used a carton of beef broth from the store and added a little more water.

Put the broth on to boil with little of the garlic and some of the green onion, and a couple tablespoons of the soup soy sauce.

Cut up your beef into thin strips, mix with garlic, a little sesame oil, a little soy sauce (this is actually supposed to be regular soy sauce, not soup soy sauce), some of the green onion (probably mostly the white bits), and black pepper, and stir fry it. (This all a "to taste" kind of thing. I put in lots of garlic. And lots of black pepper.)

Beat up the egg and add the rest of the green onion (mostly green bits). The book just calls for one egg, but I used three. My sister Betsey likes to use a lot of egg, too.

Rinse the dduk. This is supposed to keep the slices from dissolving in the soup. I'm not sure how it does that, but I guess it works.

Drop dduk slices into boiling beef broth. When the slices float to the top (which doesn't take long), turn the heat off, then add the egg mixture and stir it so the egg cooks in stringy bits.

Put in the stir-fried meat. (This can be added earlier, if you want.) Add a little more sesame oil to the soup, if you like it.



My dduk guk is thicker than what you'll generally see in Korean restaurants. It turned out really well. This batch was particularly tasty. I think it was the beef broth and all the garlic, and the dduk was a really good consistency, too. (It's easy to overcook, and then it gets slimy.) Kate was not impressed, though. I got her to taste the broth a little, and she said it was good, but she wasn't interested in actually eating it. Apparently I have been remiss in my food-acclimatization duties.

새해복 많이 받으세요!

That's what they say in Korea--"Receive many New Year's blessings." This is a picture of Kate at a recent ward activity. We have activities every month at church (usually), generally with some kind of theme, and they like to do a Chinese New Year themed dinner around this time of year. I think it's kind of too bad to focus exclusively on China, when there are other cultures that celebrate the holiday as well (especially since we do have Korean and Japanese members in the ward). We have been insinuating Korean foods into the Chinese dinner since we've been here. This year I'd been busy working on design stuff and didn't have time to prepare anything, so we just went down to Paldo World in Lakewood and picked up a few things.

This is the year of the earth rat. Our friend Scott was born in an earth rat year. He's been through the whole cycle and will be turning 60 this year. We'll have to throw him a rat-themed bash. We can watch Ratatouille. (I googled "rat-themed party," out of curiosity, and came up with a story about rat-themed panties. I don't think Scott wants any of those.)



They had these little dragon decoration things on the tables. Kate spent the entire time we were there playing with them. (You can see she's got her coat on--the heat had been off earlier and it was very cold in the building!) We're probably going to be flying somewhere this summer (either to Ohio or possibly California), so we've been keeping an eye out for things that occupy Kate's attention. The dragons were certainly a hit. I'm not sure if it was the dragon-ness or the accordian-effects of the honeycombed tissue paper that she especially liked. We ended up bringing a couple of them home. Maybe if we put them away they'll be new and exciting again by then, and she can play with them all the way to Ohio.

Oh, rats!

I haven't posted lately because I've been working on a few things. I'd been meaning to expand my Year of the Pig kit with the rest of the animals, but with the lunar new year quickly approaching it became clear that I wasn't going to be able to do all of them, so I just made a little Year of the Rat add-on.

I couldn't decide which rat pose I liked, so I just included both of them! He's a cute little guy.

The rat is the first animal in the Chinese zodiac cycle. There's a story about how this came to be. The Jade Emperor invited the animals to a party. Near the end of the journey, they animals had to cross a celestial river, and the rat tricked the ox into letting him ride on its head. When they were almost at their destination the rat jumped off the ox's head and arrived first. So the Year of the Rat comes first, and the Year of the Ox is second.

Last year I got a lot of hits from people looking for "papercut pig." I'll have to put my little rat over in the sidebar or something, for anybody looking for a papercut rat.

36 years (oink!)

My birthday came in the midst of chaos. We're surrounded by boxes, and certainly not settled, whatever that means, but we took the time to go out to lunch at our favorite Indian buffet. (And then came home and took a nap!)

I was born in the Year of the Pig, which has rolled around again. Next time the Year of the Pig comes, I'll be 48. And the time after that I'll be 60. In addition to the twelve animals, the Chinese zodiac also cycles through the five elements (the year I was born was the metal pig--this year is the fire pig), so it takes 60 years to get through the whole cycle.



Here's the "Year of the Pig" kit that I finished up in time for the Lunar New Year. (That's what my cute little papercut piggy was for.) It's been fun to see what people do with it. I wanted to share a couple of links:

Marci's "Only in Vegas" (I really like the way she cut the flowers out of the paper and layered the other stuff on them.)

Kat's "One Month (Very cool strong graphic design!)