Poetry Friday: Bee-Bim Bop!
This past Christmas holiday, I visited family and ate a lot of food! One of the dishes prepared by my sister-in-law was the Korean Bibimbap, or Bee-Bim Bop — a rather musical sounding dish to be sure. A couple nights later, I found myself reading Linda Sue Park‘s Bee-Bim Bop (illustrated by Ho Baek Lee, Clarion, 2006) to my four year old niece. Bee-Bim Bop is about a young girl who helps prepare Bibimbap with her mother. Written rather appropriately in verse and making full use of that Bee-Bim Bop alliteration and words that rhyme with ‘bop’ like ‘shop’ and ‘flip flop’ — the girl helps her mother shop, prepare and serve the meal. It was fun to read this book to my niece after we had dined on the dish so recently! I since discovered that bibimbap is often served as a lunar calendar New Year dish, so our eating it just after Christmas before the New Year was somewhat timely. But bibimpap any time of the year is delicious.
What festival foods did you and your family consume over the holidays? Are there kids books about those foods? Do drop us a line and let us know the title. Reading is a kind of feasting, after all!
Poetry Friday this week is hosted by Tara at A Teaching Life.
January 13th, 2012 at 5:12 pm
Hi Sally, looks like a really enjoyable book. Oh dear don’t get me started over the festival foods we consumed over the holidays. This is the reason why I’ve been running on an almost daily basis for the past two weeks now! Hahaha.
If I were to give a teaser, yummy deep-fried cuttlefish and Singapore-famous chili crab would be two of them. 
January 14th, 2012 at 1:37 am
Wow, this looks amazing. I never had Bibimbap until I came to Japan, but it is a common Korean fast food here. Like Korean, Japanese makes a lot of use of alliteration and I often have trouble expressing things in a similar manner in English. This looks like a great read!
As for festival foods- we ate a lot of mochi (rice cakes), possibly the least nutritionally acceptable food in the world. Even chocolate can be good for you.
It was yummy though.
January 14th, 2012 at 8:00 am
MMmm, love deep fried cuttlefish, Myra and chili crab sounds amazing. We ended our family feasting with a huge dim sum meal. Any good kids books about that, I wonder?
January 14th, 2012 at 9:31 am
We had Haitian pumpkin soup and Japanese mochi for our New Year’s celebration. I don’t know of children’s books about either, but someone should write some!
January 14th, 2012 at 3:26 pm
Sally, we’ve just eaten some gorgeous Italian torrone that I brought back from Rome in November, was saving till Christmas, and then forgot it! Yum! But reading about all the feasting in the previous comments is certainly making my mouth water for something savoury!
January 15th, 2012 at 3:20 pm
I was going to say that the food we often have for Christmas dinner is not nearly as exotic as Bee-Bim Bop, but then I realized that exotic is in the eye of the beholder.
Meat loaf. Mom’s recipe.
January 16th, 2012 at 7:51 am
Oh, lovely mouth watering comments, everyone! Torrone, pumpkin soup, mochi, meatloaf — yum, yum, yum!
January 18th, 2012 at 4:46 pm
We have this book at home and it’s a fun book especially for very young ones!