I hope you find one of the snacks I often enjoy interesting. I dedicated an entire post to it. I had my normal Iced Mocha with whipped cream today. Sungjoo then added to my norm a refreshing dish called pak bing sue. It translates exactly (pak) bean (bing) ice (sue) water. The characters that spell out the name are written in Chinese. Here is a bit of a side note. Hangul is the name of the Korean writing system. Before Hangul was invented Koreans used all Chinese characters. Chinese is a horrible language to try and learn. Just trust me on that one. There are Chinese characters all over Korea so you have to be familiar with them. They are not phonetic at all. All you can do is memorize them. When something new is invented there is no character for it. It has to be created with the product. No one on earth knows all the Chinese characters since new ones are created constantly.
My pak bing sue (my bean ice water) was absolutely amazing. There are many variations of pak bing sue. There is a green tea version that is great. It is called nook (green) cha (tea) pak bing sue. Other versions have various fruits, coffees, and teas. I have even seen a peanut butter and jelly version. The version I enjoyed today had kiwi, bananas, nuts, red beans, light chocolate syrup, and a powder made from a mixture of vegetables. You do not taste the powder at all. The ingredients are placed on top of shaved ice. You then have to mix the contents together so you can eat it without making a mess. (ma she soo yo! Delicious)

Red beans, red bean paste, and red bean extract are used in many dishes. They add a sweet taste to many foods that is not too overpowering. Let me emphasize how amazing they are. It was one of those happy strange surprises I discovered when I came over.

Thanks for reading,
Red Bean Dean, or Beans as Mrs Trainor, I mean Mrs Jones would say)

Next blog post is dedicated to baseball, Coca-Cola and pizza......Korean style