Sam Gae Tang

My mother has been feeling fatigued of late.  So we're making a Korean dish called Samgaetang, which is a Korean chicken ginseng soup.

Now, gae in this context certainly does not mean dog.  Koreans use a lot of Chinese words in their language and gae comes from the Chinese word for chicken.  In Korean, the vowel character for gae (개) as in dog differs from gae (계) as in this dish.   

계= Chinese for chicken

개 = Korean for dog

Pictured below are two of the ingredients, ginseng and dried jujubees.  The other needed ingredients are sweet rice and whole chicken.  Other variations toss in garlic and chestnuts.

When selecting ginseng for medicinal reasons, it's best to pick older, thicker roots that have not been previously steamed.  Steaming reduces the potency of ginseng (sweats out the medicine) and makes it safe for even kids to eat.  We ran into some younger grocers who didn't know the difference between steamed and non-steamed.

We purchased the fresh ginseng because we weren't finding dried, non-steamed ginseng from a reliable source.  (Herbal stores are not reliable per my parents because the stores get their medicine from China.)  The very top of the pictured roots still needs to be cut off.  You're not supposed to eat any part of the stem of the ginseng.

Below is an example of the final dish with a little bit of green onions as garnish.

Photo from here