What do you eat on the Great Full Moon Festival?

Dae-boreum The Great Moon Festival is celebrated today. It’s the first full moon of the Lunar year which falls on the 15th day of the first lunar month. This year it is March 2. And the traditional dish to eat on this day is 5 grain rice. A more luxurious option is yakbap – medicinal rice – which adds expensive ingredients like pine nuts, gingko, and chestnuts.

The food company CJ have some lovely looking yakbap dishes on their blog with an easy recipe using their ready-to-eat rice. Here they’ve added some pumpkin, gingko, jujube and chestnuts.

picture: CJ The Kitchen

Individual portions of cooked and packed rice (hetbahn) are pretty popular. They just need to be heated up in the microwave.

The ready cooked rice is even available on Amazon and advertised as ‘perfect for college students, singles, busy professionals, campers, and anyone who wants quick, healthy, and delicious rice!‘

I never buy it though, since I don’t like using microwaves and I have to get my money’s worth out of the really expensive rice cooker we bought. But someone told me that their family eats it all the time – they have a rice cooker but it’s never even plugged in!

picture: CJ The Kitchen

5 GRAIN RICE RECIPE

There are slight variations on which 5 grains are included with the sticky rice. The recipe in my The Very Best of Korean Cooking book includes ground buckwheat, black beans, red beans, and two types of millet. But the shops also offer a choice of mung beans, barley, Chinese pearl barley, soybeans, sesame, black sesame, perilla, kidney beans, and oats.

My local supermarket had a wide selection of grains on their Full Moon Festival display shelf. So I randomly selected some mysterious looking grains and then Navered them when I got home to find out what the heck I had bought!

HOW TO COOK 5 GRAIN RICE

The recipe in my recipe book involves a lot of soaking beans and cooking ingredients separately. But I just washed the grains and beans and then cooked everything together in the rice cooker. I admit some of the beans were still a bit hard though …

SIDE DISHES

Traditionally the rice is served with vegetables dried after the previous harvest. Now they are soaked and cooked and seasoned… dried courgettes, aubergines, mountain leaves, daikon radish, daikon radish leaves, chilli leaves, and dried bracken to name but a few.

Here’s some seasoned dried radish made by my mother-in-law

The Interpark online shopping mall has lots of nuts and dried leaves for sale right now.

HOPING FOR A PROSPEROUS YEAR

In farming villages, sharing rice with neighbours was meant to ensure a prosperous harvest.

And after breakfast, farming households served a meal of 5 grain rice and vegetables to their oxen. If the oxen ate the rice first, it meant there would be a good harvest that year. But it was not a good sign if the oxen ate the vegetables first.

Here’s the rice I made by the way…

NUTTY TRADITIONS:  BU-REOM GGEKI 부럼깨기, crunching nuts

Nuts are another food that should be eaten today.

So this is one of the few times of the year when I see nuts in the shells on sale in the shops. In the couple of weeks leading up to the full moon festival the supermarkets sell bags of peanuts, chestnuts, gingko, and walnuts all still in their shells.

But according to tradition, the nuts should be cracked open with your TEETH on the morning of the Full Moon.

This is supposed to ensure healthy and strong teeth for the coming year. But having recently had the unfortunate experience of biting down on the stone of a jujube and shattering my tooth, I don’t think this is a good idea for me. I will stick to using nut crackers thank you very much. But you youngsters feel free to have a go with your teeth.

OTHER TRADITIONS

While eating nuts is good for your teeth, walking over a bridge on this day is supposed to keep your legs healthy since the word for bridge (dari) sounds the same as ‘legs’ in Korean. And if you walk over 12 bridges you will have healthy legs for a whole year!

The appearance of the moon on the Great Moon Festival also predicts the fortunes for the year ahead, so let’s hope it’s a good one.

Some of the information in this post came from the Encyclopaedia of Korean Seasonal Customs.