Kimbap & Mandu!/김밥 & 만두

Since Korean food was delicious, cheap, and abundant in Seoul, I'm having a hard time coming to terms with the prices of the Korean restaurants here. (The same goes for sushi.)

Tonight, I tried making two different things for dinner:

First, tuna kimbap (Recipe linked), which is basically sushi but without raw fish. It is a pretty common, cheap meal in Korea, and a lot of people bring it on picnics. I even got to use my fancy new bamboo mat to roll it up. Whee!

(The weirdly shaped piece was the result of my dull knife.)

I also made mandu guk (Recipe linked), or "dumpling soup." I've made Chinese potstickers before, but this recipe was slightly different. The filling called for pork, beef, and tofu. Every time I make dumplings, I think to myself, "I will never do this again!" because it is labor intensive to sit alone and fold 60+ dumplings by hand. The results are always worth it though.


All in all, I was very pleased with this dinner. And just like all the meals we had in Korea, I was really, really full from the volume of food in my stomach. (I've decided that Korean food is awesome because I ate until I was really full all the time, but I still lost a little bit of weight. It probably helped that I ran around Namsan several times.)

Speaking of Namsan, here is the elevation chart from one of my runs:


Today, I ran six miles. It was rather humid and hot. Here are my splits:

• 10:08
• 9:54
• 9:42
• 9:32
• 9:38
• 9:36