Clockwise from top left: kimchi; battered and fried slices of sweet potato; sliced pineapple; eggs, mushrooms, bean sprouts and slivered hot pepper in chicken broth; bibimbap with egg, gochujang and ground-beef sauce, and steamed vegetables including squash, carrot, greens, and bean sprouts. My breakfast today also included egg and pineapple.
Instead of eating cafeteria food, today I went out to lunch with some co-workers. We went to a famous, traditional mussel-rice (홍합밥) restaurant in downtown Daegu. On the table there is mussel-rice, cabbage and perilla (들깨) soup, stir-fried baby anchovies, burdock boiled in sweet soy broth, steamed greens with sesame oil, fried pancake, two sauces (one for the pancake and one for the mussel-rice), pickled radish, and kimchi.
Clockwise from top left: kimchi; chicken jjim; ground-beef and garlic-chive pancake; soup with squares of fish cake, mushrooms and leeks; rice.
I don’t know why this picture turned out so terribly.
Clockwise from top left: lightly pickled radish and cucumber with sesame seeds; breaded fried pork cutlet with mushroom sauce; sliced apples, bananas and tangerines in sweet mayonnaise dressing; fermented soybean paste soup containing greens and mushrooms; rice.
One of my co-workers liked the fruit and mayonnaise concoction so much that she filled her lunch tray’s bottom-right soup zone with it. She used a separate bowl for her soup.
Clockwise from top left: kimchi; soft taco containing one strip of breaded chicken, one tomato slice, shredded raw cabbage, apple-flavored dressing; tangerine; steamed greens in fermented soybean paste dressing; fermented soybean paste soup containing mushrooms, tofu and (too) many sea squirts; rice with bean sprouts and seaweed, topped with soy sauce, scallions and red pepper flakes.
Clockwise from top left: radish kimchi; unidentified-meat dongaseu with honey mustard; spaghetti Bolognese; kimchi and bean sprout jjigae; rice.
Clockwise from top left: kimchi; cold steamed bean sprouts with ham and crab stick; fried yam slices in sweet sauce with black sesame seeds; ddeokguk; rice.
Clockwise from top left: radish kimchi; sea-squirt jjim; fried fish-skin in sweet sauce with sesame seeds; kimchi subeji guk, or dumpling soup in kimchi broth; rice.
I typically don’t mind my school lunches, and sometimes I even enjoy them, but today’s lunch was pretty bad. Sea squirts may be the only food that I don’t like. I haven’t eaten them enough to say definitively.
Clockwise from top left: kimchi; calamari rings with soy sauce; sliced mushrooms and Korean chives in gochujang sauce; generic “Korean” vegetable soup; rice and patjuk (red bean porridge). As you may see from clicking the patjuk link, patjuk is eaten to commemorate the winter solstice.
Clockwise from top left: kimchi; fried tangles of crab sticks and scallions with soy sauce and gochujang; shredded dry mollusk in spicy-sweet sauce; ddeokguk without ddeok, with large quantity of dry seaweed shreds in the top-right of the bowl; rice.
