yahtzee! another food pornapalooza palazzi!

while my korea posts have been severely lacking in food pictures, i hope this one partly fills the void.

i can count the number of times i've had fine dining on my hand(s?), so i was lucky to add one more finger to my rather large collection of experiences when i got to eat at chaegundam. we heard that it was a vegetarian restaurant, but they did offer meat.

you can choose among fixed meal sets, and we opted for the lower priced ones at 33k and 45k won, around 30 and 40 USD.

to start, we had a cold jellyfish dish in a light mustard sauce.

a green salad with lotus chips in a delicious berry dressing.

jap chae, a noodle dish made from yam starch

i didn't like the pickled lotus too much because they put in cinnamon, which was a weird combination for me.

refreshing white radish kimchi

a black sesame porridge

arrowroot jelly with some mixins

soy sauce shrimp

some "nigiri" was given out as service. first was dolagee (bellflower root)

along with mushrooms.

to drink, we had some makgeoulli

traditionally drank in a bowl. this one overall was average...it wasn't that great, but still drinkable.

some kind of beef wrap

a very thick mushroom soup (stew?). i think the broth was made from soy beans.

at this point, taking all of these pictures started to feel like a bloody chore, which is probably why i'll never do a sushi post, at least in the foreseeable future. big ups to kirkk on his ridiculous three part urasawa post as well as kirbie's recent post on her gaslamp tasting extravaganza.

gujeolpan, thin pancakes in which you took some of the veggies(traditionally nine, which is what gu means) and made a wrap. we were ready to throw in the towel here. belts were loosened, bellies clutched, and groans let out freely, yet still the food kept on coming

galbi jjeem, a korean pot roast type thing.

fresh out of the fryer tempura: jujubes, orange zucchini, and ginseng (?!)

mushroom and green dduk (chewy rice cake) skewers

then, as if to rebuff any thoughts that the joint wasn't legit, the traditional rice and dwenjang jjigae (soybean stew) was served.

along with a myriad of banchan. as the old man in my yoga class hooted last night "oh lordy lordy lordy!"

the rice was cooked in a dolsot (stone pot) and scraped out, leaving a thin hard crust. tea was poured in afterwards, and you eat it as a soup. (as anyone who's been to a korea tofu house probably knows).

at last, dessert was served. some dduk that was filled with red beans and pine pollen, which really tasted...piney

along with watermelon and a light fruit tea. produce was really fresh here but also quite expensive.

overall, the food was wonderful and i really enjoyed being able to experience a new dimension of korean cusine. stuffed, we decided to walk it off

to the hotel. but still bloated, we walked across the street to a buddhist temple. i really wanted to take more pictures but my camera battery died shortly after. this had to be one of my favorite places i got to see at seoul. with all the hustle going on 24 hours a day in the city, i really felt like one could find some peace and quiet here.

the more pictures i take, the more i realize the difficult challenge of trying to capture everything i felt during that particular time. still, doing the food blog has awakened an interest in photography and its self taught lessons freely given with the growing pictures i snap (yo bagels). holla.