My friend Carol is visiting in Texas so Dick is fending for himself. Poor guy. We decided to go out for dinner and try something new. So we went to a local Korean restaurant Da Rae in Fullerton, just a few blocks away. I tried Korean food some decades ago and it was okay, but didn't give me a yearning for it. Maybe it was time to try it again. We did our own online researches, but when it came to ordering the waitress was very helpful. We went mostly with her suggestions. We told her we couldn't handle spicy.
The main course comes with a myriad of small bowls with mysterious tidbits. Most were pickled something.
The large plate contains a sort of pancake with green onions and some other ingredients, I liked it a lot. In the bowl in front of me is tofu with a vinegary marinade. Directly above that is a bowl with scrambled egg cooked in a flat 'pancake', rolled and sliced, that was good.
At top are pickles with a little spicy red sauce - they tasted a lot like bread & butter pickle and were crunchy. Below that, pieces of mung bean cake with a slightly spicy marinade - good, but hard to pick up with chopsticks.
We each had a bowl of plain steamed rice and a bowl of clear soup with tofu. In the middle is a bowl of some sort of fish cake sliced - just so-so. To the right of that is sliced daikon with hot green peppers. And in the bottom corner is kimchee made with fermented cabbage.
We thought this appetizer would be crispy rice, since that was in the name, but instead it is ground rice extruded into these soft cylinders and cooked in a soy sauce flavored broth. There is also one hard boiled egg floating there. We could have done with about three each instead of a huge bowl of 20-25.
This is my beef main dish. The reason it is whitish in the middle is because it was just served and the steam is rising from it. The iron platter is VERY hot, but rests in a wooden holder. I had to wait for it all to cool down a bit. I took more than half of this home and had it for dinner the next night along with the rice.
The bones from Dick's short ribs are piled on one side of his platter. And all this food is what was left when we couldn't eat any more. We left everything except my beef and rice. Notice the steel chopsticks on the lower right side; they could be used as knitting needles. We are more accustomed to bamboo chopsticks at the Japanese restaurants, I think they hold onto the food a little better.
We will take Carol for another experiment in Korean food soon and maybe order less and share more.
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1 comment:
Wow! What an experience. Looks like a ton of food!
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