The First Day of the New Year | Sunrise Hike & Tteokguk

After a late night watching the new year countdown (and an even later night of drinking) we fell asleep fully clothed only to wake up couple hours later. It wasn’t the best planned idea, but then that could be said of our entire New Year’s Eve.

The traditional way to celebrate New Year’s Day in Korea is to get up and watch the sunrise. The most popular places for doing this are along the East Coast of Korea but since there was no way in hell we were going to attempt to get up *that* early we opted to watch the sunrise on top of our nearby mountain, Apsan.

The trail head to the peak of Apsan was not located too far from our home. Honestly we could have walked if we felt like it (we didn’t) but instead we drove the 1o minutes or so to the cable car parking lot. We also had no intention of hiking to the top.

It was still dark when we arrived and all the street lamps and lights were well lit. We circled the parking lot several times until a guy directing traffic erroneously ushered us, and many others, into a dead end. Eventually we were able to maneuver our car out and turn around but we lost a lot of time doing so. A couple more frustrated loops later we found a sketchy parking spot that required reversing uphill to parallel park on a curve, halfway on and halfway off a sidewalk.

The sky was getting lighter by the second. Wasting no time we rushed from our car up  the hill to where we had previously seen a sign for the cable car. It didn’t seem that far away, maybe we still had a chance…

It took us a very brisk, calf-burning 15 minutes to hike to where we *thought* the cable car was and then maybe another 15-20 minutes more uphill to discover where the ‘real’ cable car was. At this point I looked at the cable car slooooowwlly making it’s way down the mountain and the line of people waiting for the one cable car in operation and I thought, well, this will have to be good enough.

We found a few frost-covered benches, sat down, took off about 10 layers of clothing since we were now sweating from our unexpected climb, poured some hot tea from the metal thermos I lugged half-way up the mountain, and watched what was left of the sunrise.

Maybe this would be a good place to insert some quote about the “journey, not the reward.” I suppose there was some truth to that. It wasn’t the outcome that we wanted but hey, at least we dragged ourselves out of bed!

And honestly, it was a wonderful, invigorating and energizing (and cold) way to greet the new year. Maybe the Koreans were on to something…

Back in the cozy warmth of our home we watched the sun as it continued its trajectory over the city that was now slowly waking up like the rest of us to  a new year. Sly made matcha tea and caramelized onion  and cheese omelets for breakfast.

I can haz some?

Sly asked what I wanted to eat for lunch. I said I wanted to eat tteokguk, a traditional rice cake soup eaten on New Year’s Day to bring good luck the rest of the year. We bundled up and headed back out to our local Korean grocery store to pick up supplies. I know this is a stupid thing to say but I love how easy it is to find Korean food in, well, Korea. Finding ground beef on the other hand was not so easy. We hovered suspiciously around the butcher section of the market debating whether we Sly should ask someone to ground up some beef until we thankfully found a very small package already packed up and ready to go. The problem was the beef was outrageously expensive. Almost $20 for barely over half a kilo (or about a pound’s worth of meat). We must have stared at that package of meat for a good 15 minutes trying to decide whether we should buy it or not, reasoning that if it were that expensive then at least we were probably (hopefully) getting some badass organic hormone free grass fed free range beef. Since we don’t eat a ton of meat and since this was for our New Year’s Day meal, we went ahead and treated ourselves.

The beef was damn good.

The soup was even better.

Sly followed this very simple and easy recipe. At first Sly had doubts since traditionally the broth for tteokguk is made by simmering meat/bones for hours but it turned out to be one of the tastiest bowls of tteokguk we have ever eaten.

Served with a side of kimchi and two types of mandu = delicious!

One of my goals for the year is to adapt and simplify a few Korean recipes so that I am able to pull from them for our daily meal rotations. I think I might try making a vegetarian version of this by leaving out the anchovy sauce (which is optional anyway), perhaps subbing crispy tofu skin and shiitake mushrooms for the meat and adding some finely diced bok choy to the garnish.

exhausting day at the office

hello, 2016

Two days after New Year’s Day, Sly headed to Seoul to fly back to California for two weeks of training — yet another reason why we chose to stay at home this holiday season. Knowing this we spent the rest of the first day of the new year doing what we had been doing the entire holiday season: eating, watching movies in pjs, and squeezing our kitties.