Celebrating Chinese (Lunar) New Year

Our foodie friends Brian and Rebecca hosted us Sunday night for a Chinese New Year feast. I could tell you how much my companion and I enjoyed the food, but I think the fact that we each put on three additional pounds overnight speaks for itself. (My jeans are cutting me in half as I write this.) These people can cook, and they are great fun to be around. Brian lived in Korea for two years while serving on his Mormon mission, so we enjoyed a wide variety of Korean food, as well as a blessing in Korean before our meal!




This is what we ate:

• Bulkogi: marinated beef wrapped in lettuce--a tastier, and probably more authentic version of what everyone eats at P.F. Chang's these days.
• Chap Ch'ae: (So much fun to say!) noodles with meat and vegetables, not dissimilar to Pad Thai
• Daenjan Chigae: a delicious bean curd soup, and even six-month-old Laura tried it and liked it!
• Sigumchi: parboiled spinach with sesame, raw garlic and soy
• Kim: a crunchy, wafer-thin piece of seaweed seasoned with sesame oil and salt

The piece de resistance had to be the dessert. Chocolate cake frosted with chocolate pudding. But chocolate cake isn't Korean, you say. We justified its inclusion by appreciating Brian's stories of concocting this dessert for his Korean friends. "They all loved it," he assured us, and thus a sufficent connection to the occasion was made, and we plowed into this amazing cake, which included 14 (!) tablespoons of cocoa.