This week is Chuseok, which is the Korean harvest festival. It is traditional to make and eat Songpyeon which are rice cakes during Chuseok. We have never made or eaten them before but that changed last week when we decided to try our hand at making them. Clint soaked the rice the night before and then worked on grinding it into a fine flour while the kids gathered pine needles from the trees in the yard. Songpyeon is traditionally colored with natural dyes so the kids and I went to work on those with blueberries, raspberries and peaches that we heated and strained. We did end up using food coloring for green but the other colors we made were all natural. Leighton roasted the sesame seeds and instead of red beans which are a traditional filling we went with chopped walnuts and honey. The dough was not the easiest to work with and we struggled to make the moon shaped traditional shape….ours looked like blobs. Often they are decorated beautifully and well ours looked more like a child’s play-doh mess. But we tried, if you want an idea of what they are suppose to look like then feel free to google Songpyeon. To cook them we steamed them over the pine needles that the kids picked. It did give them a nice flavor but the pine needles were not the easiest thing to pick off the hot rice cakes. Everyone was very excited to try them with our lunch and that’s about where the excitement ended. I can’t say that anyone was a huge fan of them. I think I definitely made them too thick which may have been part of it. So we will try again later or track down somewhere to order them, but we had fun making them.
Hiking Mommy 