Gukmul Tteokbokki for Dinner | Eating to Live No. 2
Can Gukmul Tteokbokki Become an Ordinary Dinner? **Food for people who still have work to do tomorrow.** Tteokbokki is usually introduced to people outside Korea as street food. That is not wrong. It is red, spicy, sweet, chewy, and immediately recognizable. It belongs to school afternoons, market stalls, small snack shops, paper cups, fish cakes, fried snacks, and the kind of craving that does not need much explanation. In Korea, we even have a category for food like this: **bunsik**, a broad Korean category of inexpensive, casual snack-style meals that often sit somewhere between a snack and a full meal. I have no interest in taking that identity away from tteokbokki. Tteokbokki *is* bunsik. It *is* fun. But there is another way I have eaten it in my own kitchen. Not as something to hold me over until dinner. **As dinner itself.** That difference began with a very ordinary question. After a long day of work, when tomorrow is already waiting for me, can a bowl of Korean *gukmul tteokb...