A Day In Korea

You know how usually you have different groups of friends whose personalities you keep sorta separated? Well, lucky me because most of my friends are so awesome that it doesn't matter what environment you put them in, they'll always be comfortable and make others feel the same way. :) Two of my favorite NYC ladies, Kristine and Abbey, fall into that category. We, along with Allison and Amanda, used to have ladies dinners often where we'd pick a new place to try and all go enjoy it together. Sadly, Amanda moved to Atlanta two years ago so it's just been the four of us to carry on our dinner tradition.

That said, Kristine invited us all over to her apartment on Sunday for a "day trip to Korea". Being of Korean heritage, Kristine grew up eating some amazing dishes that she decided she wanted to cook and share with us. I've been lucky enough to have had some delicious Korean food before but I was so excited that Kristine wanted to cook for us. There's nothing better than being invited into someone's home and having them prepare a meal for you. As you can probably tell in my post about Jeff and Suzanne, dinner parties are one of my favorite things. In this case, it was a lunch party. :)

We got to Kristine's around 1:30pm on Sunday afternoon, popped open some vino, and visited while she finished cooking. It was hilarious because Kristine had slippers for us to wear, since taking off your shoes in the house is a Korean custom, but we all had silly socks us which just made us giggle:

We all haven't been together in quite a while so there was lots to catch up on! When it was finally time to eat, we died at how much Kristine outdid herself. Since I'd had Korean food before, I requested bulgogi which is a fantastic beef dish. Kristine totally indulged my request and made that along with several other Korean specialties such as dduk-mandoo-guk (rice-cake dumpling soup), jap-chae (noodles with veggies), shrimp and kimchee pancake, sae-woo/kimchee-jun and sik-hye (an amazing sweetened rice beverage for after dinner). Unreal:

I'm telling you right now, it was outta this world. The soup was my favorite outside of bulgogi, of course. The rice cakes had the best texture and the dumplings were delicious. It was sort of like Korean comfort food and the flavors in the broth itself were outstanding. Abbey and Allison were in heaven too and it was fun to see them try all these things for the first time. Between Suzanne and Kristine, I had one killer food weekend for sure.

PS - We stayed until 9:00pm drinking vino and eating on and off. Now, that's one perfect day if you ask me.