More On Food...

We had rice cakes and mamosa bread for tea time this AM.

Yum on the rice cakes. I don’t really know how to explain them…they are very sticky, smooth rice balls, about the size of a ping pong ball. I’ve only seen white ones and green ones (and as a matter of fact, I don’t think the green ones are made of rice, yet of some type of green vegetable). They are rice-tasting on the outside and sweet on the inside. It’s a type of seongpyeon. During Chuseok, or Korean Thanksgiving, seongpyeon is a popular food item, but it’s a little different from what I had today; the kind at Chuseok has honey in the middle of the rice cake.

Mamosa bread has jam and what seemed like cream cheese in layers. It was pretty good.

In shopping areas, they have keultarae stands and it’s so fun to watch them make it. Usually it is 3 or 4 guys singing and chanting and describing the candy-making process. It is made of honey and it’s stringy; it actually looks like thin white strings – it’s amazing to watch. I'm no math whiz, but there is a mathematical concept behind it: they start out one string, then it turns into 2 strings, then it turns into 4, then it turns into 16. So, I think it's like this:

1 string, 2 strings, then 2 to the 2nd power, 2 to the 3rd power, 2 to the 4th power, 2 to the 5th power, 2 to the 6th power and so on, until they get to 1024 strands and that makes one batch.

It really is amazing to watch – they do it quickly so it’s impossible (for me, anyway) to be able to tell how they are doing it. It’s like they take the strings and dip them down into what appears to be flour, and twist the strings through their fingers and when they shake off the excess powder, the number of strings have multiplied.

Wow! ;)

I know a guy who has a video of it so when I figure out how to upload videos to this thing, I will enlighten you. :)