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What's at the heart of many Asian families is their stomach. A celebration always involves lots of food, and the food we eat always speaks volumes about the occasion that is being celebrated. The Chinese developed an incredible vocabulary of food during the course of centuries of fine dining, and their influence is felt across much of Asia. Asian dishes are as rich in symbolic meaning as they are in flavor.

Korean families like mine mark the New Year with a serving of duk guk, or Korean rice cake soup. Having the soup is supposed to add one year to your life, according to my mother, who has been eating duk guk for 50-something years now.

Choosing Chinese? Craving Kimchi? Got a yen for Japanese? Check out this week's Top Picks: Asian!

If you associate Korean cuisine with spicy, pungent foods like kimchi, duk guk is surprisingly mild, lightly flavored by the beef stock used as the soup's base. It is simple, fare, but quite filling, thanks to its slippery slices of chewy, dense Korean rice cake, which is similar to Japanese mochi. In fact, Japanese families share their own version of a new year's rice cake soup, called ozoni, for which there are literally thousands of different recipes.

At my family's New Year's Day gatherings, we spend as much time not talking to each other because we're just too busy eating. Besides the obligatory bowl of duk guk, there's always plenty of hot, fried bindaeduk (Korean pancakes made with bean sprouts), savory servings of japchae (sweet potato noodles mixed with stir-fried vegetables) and kalbi (the broiled marinated ribs that are so popular at Korean barbecue houses). Of course, no Korean meal is ever complete without quantities of kimchi and rice, which forms the anchor of the meal. My grandmother always claimed that the more you ate, the more good things came your way. I expect a lot to happen for the next millennium.