Happy Seollal 설날 and Lunar New Year!

Koreans say 새해 복 많이 받으세요 (saehae bok mani badeuseyo), which means I hope you receive many blessings in the New Year. 

As I bid farewell to the Year of the Dragon and welcome the Year of the Snake, I find myself in a state of commotion and disorder at Chez Kim-Martin. Both Gaston and Romaine have injured their left legs. So I'm now the house muscle daddy, carrying Gaston up and down stairs, stacking wood, shoveling snow, and lifting heavy things. We are also in the midst of dining room renovations, which is exciting, but also a bit challenging. We've moved everything from the dining room to random places in the house, which vexes a nester like me who needs a clean and orderly home to find peace and relaxation. Alas, as I write this in my office, I'm sitting next to Gaston, a bar cart, several house plants, a bag of dog food, and other clutter that I cannot bring myself to organize. I accept this chaos and tell myself this construction will soon end—in the dining room, at least.

For Seollal, the Korean version of Lunar New Year, I decided to make seolleongtang 설렁탕, a food that holds fond memories. Whenever we ate this soup, my parents would often mention my mother's food cravings while she was pregnant with me. My mom said they were so intense she felt like she would cry if she couldn't eat her desired foods. One of them was seolleongtang. She'd have my dad drive her to her favorite spot in Los Angeles and devour two enormous bowls. We'd eat this soup at home and, if lucky, at a restaurant specializing in this dish when we visited Los Angeles and Korea. When Romaine proposed, he made an extravagant multi-course meal, and one of the dishes involved seolleongtang broth, which he had spent all night making. At a Madame Kim's Supper Club, I served seolleongtang broth with rice cakes to celebrate Seollal with my guests.

Seolleongtang is an ox bone broth soup with slices of boiled beef (often brisket) and mu radish served with silky thin somyeon noodles floating around the broth. You season your own bowl of soup as you like with finely sliced green onion, sea salt, garlic, and gochugaru; you eat the soup with a bowl of rice and thick cubes of kkakdugi 깍두기 or radish kimchi. Seolleongtang is a comforting and nourishing food for Koreans, and this Korean queen was in desperate need of comfort and decided to devote a day to making this broth.

On Monday, I pulled the beef leg bones with marrow and a couple of short ribs from the freezer (I got these from Rebop Farm) to thaw. You can use various bones, but using leg bones is essential. My mom likes to add oxtails, knuckles, and feet, which give the broth more body. She is lucky to have access to these cuts at her Korean grocery store. I try to use as much of what I can procure from farms in my region because the nearest Asian groceries are at least an hour away. On Tuesday, I soaked the bones and meat with some fresh beef brisket for thirty minutes in water to draw blood from the meat.

Then, I parboiled the meat and bones at a rolling boil for ten minutes to help clarify the broth from the outset. After parboiling, I rinsed everything off, put the bones and meat back into the large clean pot, and covered them with water. I added a knob of ginger and peeled daikon and began the daylong process of making the broth. I kept the boil rolling, adding water as it evaporated. First, the broth turned a clear light brown, and eventually, the marrow came out of the bones and liquified into a golden layer of fat. After three hours, the meat was tender, and I removed it from the pot. After 6 hours, the broth became more opaque, getting closer to that milkiness I sought. I continued boiling the broth for a few more hours and strained the first batch into another large empty pot with a cover, which I set outside in a pile of snow to chill, moving it occasionally to help it cool more quickly. 

I refilled my stock pot with more water for a second boil and let the stock rock for another three hours until the broth was a milky beige. I could have done a third boil, but it was getting late, and I was ready to chill by the fire. Then, I strained the second batch of broth and chilled it in the snow, discarding the bone into my compost. After the broth cooled, I chopped up the meat and radish, added them to four-quart containers, and topped them with the gorgeous broth. I strained the remaining broth into quart containers, labeled them, and popped them in my chest freezer in the basement, leaving a few quarts in my fridge for Seollal dinner. I made 14 quarts of broth for seolleongtang or to add to soups, stews, or whatever calls for beef broth.

For Seollal dinner on Wednesday, I heated the broth with the sliced beef and radish and infused the broth with a slice of ginger to get rid of any gamey notes, a couple of cloves of crushed whole garlic, and a few slices of jalapeno for that vegetal green flavor I love. Since Koreans eat tteokguk 떡국, rice cake soup, on New Year's Day, I added sliced tteok 떡 (rice cakes) to cook in the broth and served that instead of noodles and rice. I finished the soup with sea salt, white pepper, and a point of vinegar to balance the flavors. After ladling generous portions of soup into large bowls, I topped each bowl of seolleongtang with thin slices of scallion, strips of egg, and crumbled seaweed. Romaine and I ate our New Year's soup on our couch in our living room, using our coffee table as our dinner table like we used to when we were first dating and living in small apartments in Brooklyn.

As a first-generation American and daughter of immigrants, I try to maintain a connection to the Korean diaspora by celebrating our holidays, even if it means having a simple dinner on the couch with Romaine. Cooking Korean cuisine is something that I'm continually learning about and improving on, and I've come to love and respect the techniques my mother taught me; the ones she learned from her mother. The Year of the Snake is about shedding: letting go of bad energy, transforming, embracing new possibilities, and growing—themes I find comfort in as we continue navigating change at Chez Kim-Martin. 

Cheers,

Jen Kim

Moments of Everyday Opulence

Small things that make my day-to-day feel more luxurious

Watching Maangchi, the internet’s favorite Korean auntie, make anything. Here is a video of her making seolleongtang.

Here is Hyosun’s (of Korean Bapsang) version of seolleongtang.

Putting coconut oil in my hair as a hair mask once a week to make it feel shiny and lustrous. 

We spent our winter holidays traveling through Japan and have been trying to prolong the delights from that journey by making a lot of Japanese style lemon sours with yuzu juice (bottled) and some fresh Meyer lemons that I found. Instead of shochu, however, we’ve been using a small amount of gin since this is a low abv beverage. 

Dot é pen, I grabbed a few of these markers on a whim whilst wandering around a stationary store in Tokyo. I love the square tip useful to quickly track items in my planner, or to create check lists.

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