Korean Thanksgiving - Part I

We were fortunate enough to be invited to celebrate Korean Thanksgiving (Chuseok) with Boram's family.  Usually Koreans return to their hometowns for family meals and ancestral rituals.

One of the most popular presents around Thanksgiving (which harkens back to the older, poorer days of Korea). Boram got one as a gift from her office!

Thanksgiving feast! We still haven't mastered sitting on the floor yet and both get absurd leg cramps every time we try.

Korean fruit salad...with corn of course.

Learning Korean traditional games with Boram's dad.
 

Not the best poker face.

Korean breakfast, or more specifically a feast of leftovers. Usually, Koreans eat the same food for breakfast as they do at any other meal (kimchi, rice, vegetables, etc.)

Making traditional rice cake.  This is rice that has been ground into flakes and mixed with mugwort powder. We looked up what it was too...

Kneading it like dough.

Adding freshly squeezed grape juice to another batch.

Filling the dough balls with a brown sugar and sesame seed mixture....

and making little dumplings.

Finally, they go into a huge steamer and come out looking like this.  It's really hard to describe what they're like, since the rice becomes really chewy, but they taste great because the brown sugar and sesame seeds melt together on the inside.

In Part 2, we pay respects to Boram's elders, after a brief food coma...