Today is Lunar New Year’s — Seol in Korean — a day when everybody gets a year older and eats rice cake soup for good luck. The white, moon-shaped cakes traditionally symbolize purity and prosperity, but for me growing up, getting to eat ddukguk was just a delicious expression of motherly love.

I was a picky eater as a child, but I’ve always loved rice cakes. Because the cake rolls come prepackaged and sliced into thin oval coins, there is usually only one random, fat chunk from the end. And whenever my mom made ddukguk, she would fish through the pot with her ladle, looking for that big chunk to give to me. And when I’m home, she still does.

With Ben and I out in Korea on our own, I’m the one who cooks the ddukguk. Yesterday we picked up a bag of rice cakes from a specialty store around the corner, and even before I dumped them in the broth, I saw the chunk. Ben let me have it.

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