Seoul Eats has a few mouthwatering Photoblogs from the Amazing Korean Table Event that took place in Seoul. Ginseng Kimbap and Foie Gras with Kimchi? It all looks incredible.
The Street Festival Photoblog

Master Class Photoblog

Jaengban Gooksu, a cold soba salad, is healthy, filling, and colorful. It can be a hearty meal with the addition of meat or hard-boiled egg, and it's effortlessly super-healthy with buckwheat noodles and a dressing made from broth, not oil.

Soba salad photo © Naomi Imatome 2009, licensed to About.com.

I'm still in love with Korean-style frozen yogurt and I spread my love around- I go to the closest Red Mango, Pinkberry, or Yogurtland for my fix. I also make it at home with tart Greek yogurt or plain organic yogurt mixed with vanilla. The best thing about this type of frozen yogurt is that it's actually real yogurt (in the past, frozen yogurt in America was made of very little REAL yogurt). So you get a delicious treat (or lunch if you're one of those people that can make a meal of a yogurt or a salad) plus all the health benefits of the good bacteria.

There was some anecdotal evidence that kimchi helped people recover from SARS (avian bird flu), and South Koreans were mostly unaffected by the bird flu that swept through Asia. So these days, with rising concerns about H1N1 during the winter season, South Koreans are eating more kimchi than ever to ward off this new flu.

I'm not a doctor and I don't even play one on TV, but I do know fermented foods/probiotics are always recommended as preventative medicine to strengthen the immune system. I also swear by a cold remedy tea which includes ginger and hot chili pepper, two ingredients found in many types of kimchi. But it's nice to have an excuse to eat more kimchi, so this is the first news about H1N1 that is good news to me.

The "Amazing Korean Table: World Feast of Gastronomy 2009", Seoul's first gourmet food festival, will take place from October 28th - November 1st. It's an over-the-top fantastic title for what sounds like it will be pretty incredible event: Korean nouvelle cuisine, celebrity chefs from around the world, young chef competitions, master cooking classes, and Korean street fare and slow food tasting events.

Whether you like watching cooking shows, dramas, romantic comedies, adventures, or biographies on TV or in the theater, you'll love Dae Jang Geum (Jewel in the Palace). This highly addictive Korean miniseries is over 50 episodes long, and it has it all.

Dae Jang Geum photo still © YA Entertainment.

Citifield, the sparkly just-built home of the NY Mets, has just opened a Korean and Japanese food court inside the World's Fare Market located at right field. The new stadium already hosts a number of good food options from Manhattan (like Blue Smoke and Shake Shack), but now they're also including favorites from nearby downtown Flushing. So you can enjoy your baseball game in the new not-too-tight stadium seats with Korean fried chicken, a bulgogi and rice bowl, or mandoo (Korean dumplings). Luckily, all of those things also go well with beer. Go Mets!

Trust me, it tastes better than it sounds. A lot of the Korean dishes that I love sound terrible in translation to English, but this soup (Bugo Gook) is one of the easiest and tastiest Korean soups to make. It is light and a bit sweet, and Koreans love it for breakfast after a night of hard drinking. I usually spice it up with a serious dusting of kochukaru (red pepper flakes) or eat it alongside a really hot dish.

Korean meals are all about the balance of flavors and textures. For me, a lot of that comes into play with the side dishes (banchan) at the meal. The combination of spicy, sweet, cool, salty, and tart small bites makes everything come together.

Some popular Korean side dishes for fall:

• Egg Battered Zucchini (Hobak Jun)
• Steamed Egg (Gaeran Jim)
• Soy Braised Beef and Peppers (Changjorim)



Banchan Photo © Grace Yun 2009, used with permission.

Linda Sue Park's charming book "Bee-Bim Bop!" was recently chosen by the public libraries of New York as one of the Top 20 favorite stories to read aloud. Fun and melodic, it's a great gift for a child that already loves Korean food or for parents that want to pass the pleasure of eating and mixing bibimbap along to their kids.