miyuk gook aka birthday soup

i got a new niece this week! yeah!!!!!! i will blog about the arrival of my sweet niece after my sister-in-law has a chance to blog about her daughter. but seeing as how she is now the mama of 3 little ones, i will give her a week, and if she hasn't blogged by thursday, i will go ahead and blog for her ;)

my quest to be more culturally legit continues as i did something REALLY korean this week. i made 'miyuk gook', which translates into seaweed soup, which koreans eat on their birthdays. they do this because post-partum mothers are made to consume a lot of this soup. seaweed is very high in iron, calcium, and protein, and so it is thought to be a great way for new mothers to replenish their blood stores. so since mothers eat this when they have babies, those babies celebrate their birth by eating this soup on their birthdays. so i made this soup for my sister-in-law lindsay, in honor of her having given birth on thursday.

the soup is relatively easy to make. though i still managed to mess it up a bit.
i am 30 years old and i have never attempted to make this soup before. my mom's 'recipe' is awesome. i could eat her version of this soup till i am blue in the face. jeehon also makes a great miyuk gook. mine was greasier than it should have been. oopsie. but i know the errors of my ways, so whoever has a baby next will have a less-greasy version of what lindsay and robert ate tonight. (robert texted that he had some too as he wanted to "heal his uterus too".)

here is the general recipe:
-some water
-some kind of meat on bone, or beef soup stock
-garlic
-sesame oil
-soy sauce
-dried seaweed
-salt, pepper, garlic salt to taste

so i put the dried seaweed in a bowl so it could be not-dry. let it sit for about 20-30 minutes.
this is what dried seaweed looks like when it sits in water for a while:

this is what dried seaweed looks like:

this is what dried seaweed looks like in the bag:


then i started a big pot with some water in it with the beef. i put some salt,
pepper, and crushed garlic into the water and let it boil. like crazy. as the beef is boiling, gross stuff will float to the top of the water that looks like white and brown froth. that's fat from the meat. you're supposed to skim that off the top and throw it out. in the sink. i did this. but not enough. thus the greasiness. my bad. so get all that junk off the top. add the seaweed, and some drops of sesame oil and soy sauce and let it keep cooking. add more seasoning as you feel led to do so.

serve with rice.

eat and listen to your body, especially your uterus, thank you.

this may not be something that everyone enjoys, but i am so delighted that i married into this watson clan that is very accepting of my experiments with korean cooking!

congrats to robert and lindsay for having survived my first attempts with miyuk gook, and for having created this piece of squishy beautiful awesomeness:

(what? like i was going to blog about the fact that emma was born and only have pictures of seaweed and NOT add a single picture of her?)