Street Food Galore

Insadong had a lot of street food vendors... so here we go:


Ok, so this first one wasn't from a street food vendor, but all of the little cakes and whatnot just looked very pretty so I took a picture.



Item #1: Some sort of glutinous rice cake (mochi in japanese). This kind was made with a black rice, so it had a dark purple color. The filling was some sort of peanut paste. This tasted very good.



Skewers of meat products, like yakitori. I had a skewer of chicken meat, and a skewer of chicken gizzards. The gizzards were actually better than the regular meat (which wasn't bad, it was just not that special).



At this stall, I got a rice cake fried on a stick (the ones in the middle wrapped with seaweed). The rice cake is wrapped in some sort of batter-like material and then fried. The guy at the stand offered ketchup, mustard, and some mysterious green sauce... or you could get it "multi-delicious" (all three sauces). This was pretty good as well, but I think I'll skip the multi-delicious next time.



Scary food #1: beondegi, or boiled silkworm larvae! For some reason, I expected these to taste sweet, but they're boiled in salty water. I wanted to like them, but they honestly weren't that good in my opinion. Sort of crunchy on the outside, but the "meat" of the bugs was too organy tasting (sort of like liver or kidney, but pastier). Oh well, it was worth a try! I'm not sure what was in the pot on the right... it looked like a whole bunch of mini-conch shells. Maybe next time.



The next course was some sort of little pancake-like pastry with sweet red-bean paste in the middle. These were pretty good, although I think they were slightly undercooked.



I didn't eat this, but I found it when we stopped briefly in a convenience store (to get out of the cold while we figured out where to go next). Mmmm, pre-packaged bacon. Note, the package reads "Fresh food, Good life"... so what kind of life do you get from eating pre-packaged bacon?



I actually got this on Sunday while searching for hair clippers. It's basically a sausage casing (i.e., intestine or some other part of the GI tract) filled with some sort of black rice... at first I thought it might be Korean Mustamakkara, but alas it was not. Again, battered in something and fried, and then dipped in some sweet and spicy sauce. It was actually pretty good despite being not-quite-a-sausage.