Lunar New Year – Korean food tour

Happy (belated) Lunar New Year! This year Seollal fell on February 10, and I went down to Busan for the first time in a long time to visit family for the holiday. I had so much delicious home cooking, I wanted to share some of the good eats with you.

I took the train down the Wednesday before and so had a few good meals before the big day. My dad’s side of the family is from an island, and Busan is a port city, so whenever I visit I always get my fill of seafood.

As I was watching my aunt prepare various side dishes, I noticed just how many types of seaweed they normally consume. Here are a few of the different seaweeds:

On Friday I helped make the seaweed and fish jeon (savory pancakes) to eat the following day. The fish is dalgogi (John dory) and the seaweed is parae (Green laver)

It’s traditional to have dduk-guk (rice cake soup) on the first of the year. Broth, rice cakes, green onions, with egg and dried seaweed on top are pretty universal ingredients. Some add beef, but my dad’s side of the family adds tofu, which was nice. This soup also had oysters, yum!

After dduk-guk for breakfast, we just snacked on fruit and rice cakes during the day to save room for the big holiday feast. A few years ago my family switched to buffet-style serving, but traditionally all these foods would be divided into smaller dishes and laid out along the table where we eat.

I left for Seoul on the Sunday afternoon after, but not before having one last lunch at home. Leftovers of the jeon, octopus, tang-guk (soup) along with some salad kept my belly happy and full for the trip back home.

Hope you all are having a healthy and happy 2024. Sending you best wishes in this Year of the Blue Dragon!