A Heart-Shaped Hole in the Potato Chip

I just bought a box of potato chips.....

when..I glanced a bizarre yet....unique shape ...so familiar.....ㅋㅋㅋ

I was actually on the escalator...on my way home...when I couldn't contain my excitement of finding this heart-shape hole!!!

It's trivial, really. nothing special maybe..but for me..it did make my afternoon. It put a smile on my face...since I thought of it as something unusually too good to be true.

hmm..I loved it till I found it..too nice to crunch....

but I ended up eating it eventually.

Jaws

Just when we feel like munching. ..we go to Jaws and grabbed some Korean snacks.

most of them are twikim or gorengan/tempura..

FARM on the ROAD

Was at the office and found out someone brought us this biscuits I never saw before.

Called 'Farm on the Road' the Almond Meringue...and it turned out to be wow.. 

It did tickle my tongue and begged me for more. It really melted in my mouth so flawlessly in the sense that it offered some sense and taste I'd never tasted before. 

Call it an advertisement or not..I am not advertising it...simply...stating that I do love this.

The only PROBLEM with it is that...it IS quite ExpENSIVE compared to other snacks.^^

ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ

Too-Pretty To Dig In...

Just look at them. I never thought that they were tteok or Korean rice-cake. My friend, Nani (a Korean), decided to sign off from KBS World since she's now a professor assistant at her department. She's busy. And what does that have something to do with these tteok? 

Well, as token of gratitude or I guess..a sort of saying goodbye ..she brought these lovely tteok to the office. We shared eating them.^^ 

It is called 증편 (jeungpyeon). It tastes just like apem or Javanese rice-tteok. Exactly the same. The difference only lies in the simple fact that I had never seen apem wrapped beautifully like this one.

Chuseok--Korea's Thanksgiving Day

풍성한 한가위 되세요^^

"Have an affluent Chuseok"

Chuseok, Chuseok, Chuseok..that's the catchy word for these days.

추석 or Chuseok or Thanksgiving Day for Korean comes today on September 29. 

Of course based on the lunar calendar, it is the 15th day of the 8th month. The full moon is right her for us to behold. 

Ok, I am not going to tell about this festivity directly but....what comes along with it...is what prompted me to write this entry.

I was walking by, transferring at, going to several subway stations....and..to my surprise, something caught my attention. Lots of new-to-my-eyes snacks were like popping out of nowhere in just one night..or that..I never paid any attention to i before? Anyhow, these traditional snack, candies, cookies, and sweets were all there to celebrate the Chuseok Holiday.

Since they were so tempting and that..I never tried those kinds of snacks before...I was urged to try it. The price was not pricey. It cost only 1,200 won per 100 grams of any kinds you took. So, I took some that interest me. A kind of random sampling^^

This is what I bought. So colorful, right?

Although I did not know most of their names^^:D....I enjoyed eating them very much.

Some resembled snacks back home in Indonesia. I guess...the rice flour being the main ingredient of this traditional snack was the reason why we had similar stuffs back home.

Happy Chuseok, everyone.^^

Have an affluent chuseok.

(I know that we should have eaten some songpyeon--the representative tteok or rice-cake in Chuseok), but  we have not yet eaten them.^^Instead, we had this first.^^

Lost in the midst of Tea - Scented Alley

where else..but...in Insadong. Insadong being the famous place for all-antique-traditional and at times at the same time...contemporary blend of Korean culture is a place to be when you are into something like old-day Korean tea-house.

and..that's where we were going to that day. Along with a bunch of friends from the Presidential Council on Nation Branding in Korea, we went there to sip and enjoy the ubiquitous atmosphere being offered there. I had seojeonghwa or a cinnamon tea. (I think this was what I drank). And the best part about this place...was that...no matter how much you drink...all the snacks or gwaja are free. So, we got served with ample of Korean traditional gwaja

This was the door leading to the tea house that we went to. If only the red-mark notice on the door was omitted, it would've been nicer...giving more an authentic traditional look on it. ^^

Korean gwaja or snacks

We bought some of these Korean snacks that we did not know before.Ghana coco pie, corn chips, butter coconut chips, PEPERO J, cereal, strawberry cereal chips, and many others not visible there.

We can eat most of them. Most of them? Yes....because the particular coco pie was not something that we can eat since it contains gelatin from pig. So, it was a good thing that we knew it now. Some of our friends did not know it before so before consuming any gwaja, we should check the ingridients contained in the product. I was lucky to be able to read Hangeul otherwise it would hard to imagine what to eat here. The good thing about most gwaja in Korea was that (although...sadly speaking—they are mostly written in Korean alphabet ‘hangeul’)they provide ample information of what the ingredients were. In fact, most of them even show where they come from. Nice, right? So, the next time we buy something (any food) we’d always make sure that no pig or pork or any gelatin-like ingredients were inside or contained in them. I do hope that this information would be of help for others, too. Especially for any Muslims who concern about the halal labeling of the food—which is a rare case, yet.