wait, you're supposed to refrigerate rice after you cook it?

Hey everyone,

Happy Chuseok!! This weekend is one of Korea's most important holidays: Chuseok (if you hadn't already guessed=) It's comparable to Thanksgiving in the US, and involves families gathering together in celebration of a bountiful harvest. As part of the festivities a memorial service is offered to ancestors. Traditionally, small, moon-shaped rice cakes (songpyeon) steamed on a bed of pine needles are given as gifts and consumed on a mass scale. Businesses are closed for 2 or 3 days; I get a 4 day holiday from school!

So far, the best thing about being a teacher is the gifts-I promise I'm not really this shallow. =) This week I received some beautiful rice cakes, in all shapes and sizes with all sorts of stuff in them, from a couple of students. One of them gave me a lovely box of beautiful rice cakes, and for some reason, I forgot that you refrigerate cooked rice.... I'm apparently that dumb foreigner who doesn't apply the laws of physics to strange-looking foods. So this morning after a beautiful church service (which included a celebration of the Elevation of the Holy Cross and a memorial service for Chuseok), with the Metropolitan and four other priests, whose first languages include Greek, English, Korean, and Russian, present, I tried my five-day-old rice cakes....and discovered a small village of mold on each one =( I then spent way too long (about 45 minutes) painstakingly trying to remove the mold and still have some rice cake leftover. After all, this was a cultural experience and I wasn't going to let a little green fuzz get in my way!

Then, I realized that mold just makes things taste bad. And however these cakes tasted before, they didn't taste that good now. Bummer. I just started laughing at myself as I threw them all away. =( Too bad none of you are here to laugh at me, too.

Tonight I'm going to a traditional Korean dance/music/Shaman moon-greeting festival, and I can't wait to write to you all about it. Enjoy the weekend wherever you are.

Lots of love, Maria