Korean New Year feast

Meet our newest friends, the Shins. They are a Korean family living near us in Qingdao. Like us, they don't have family nearby, so their Lunar New Year celebrations are quiet, like ours. We met the Shins yesterday when we showed up at their door for a holiday meal! We have a Chinese friend here who is teacher to the children in this family, and she set us all up together. We didn't know what to expect, but then, neither did our hosts. The Shins have two girls, "Cindy" age 11, and "Sarah", age...7-ish. Mrs. Shin is 40, a busy houosewife, and Mr. Shin works for a company that makes containers for high-end designer products.

We didn't know what to expect, though we wound up having a great time. The girls speak Korean, Chinese, and English, and our friend Laila was also there to interpret. Mrs. Shin claims not to speak English, but you can tell she can understand most everything, though she generally spoke in Chinese or Korean.

In Korea and China both, dumplings (mondoo in Korean and jiaozi in Chinese) are a customary New Year food. We spent some time all around the table assembling dumplings from the filling Mrs Shin had prepared. The filling contained tofu, thick rice noodles, onions, garlic, meat, and several other items. They smelled great, even before they were cooked. Here's Laila cutting dough.

Mrs. Shin, Cindy, and Laila rolling dough.

Mrs. Shin steaming the dumplings:

Bruce ready to dig in:

The other dish we ate, I had never seen before and never did get a Korean name for. Essentially, it was vegetables of various sorts (mildly spicy green peppers, napa cabbage, zucchini rounds, sesame leaves, etc) filled with a different meat/vegetable filling, battered with egg and spring onion, and pan fried. Here's Mrs. Shin using a typical Korean cooking setup, consisting of a large electric griddle set on a small low table on the floor. She cooks using extra-long chopsticks, squatting in front of the griddle.

Here's the product: succulent, crispy, and healthy veggie yummies.




Meanwhile, Vivi and Sarah were off playing by themselves. Sarah said that Vivi talks too fast for her to understand, but that didn't seem to interfere with some serious fun.



Vivi played so hard and ate so much that she fell asleep. Oh wait, no, that's pretend sleeping!