Korean Food

Tonight the gang went out for Lumpkin's Birthday.  She insisted we go to the Korean Restaurant, because for some strange reason she thinks that Korean is the best food. I honestly do not get it.  No offense to Koreans, but I am just not into your cuisine!  And I consider myself to have a pretty adventurous palate, but a bowl of chunks of cow liver and pears floating in blood broth doesn't do much for my taste buds. The thing is, in Baltimore, the Korean restaurants stay open all night (or so it seems).  You can basically go there after all the bars have closed and get a huge number of appetizers and food and even fun foreign beers!  I have heard that they are running a brothel out of some of these places, and I guess it doesn't surprise me that much.  Just adds to the mystique!

 The array of mini appetizers is pretty exciting, until you start to really look at what you are getting.  Besides the kimchi, fruitcake potato salad and various gelatinous mysteries, there is literally a bowl of guppies slathered in sesame seeds.  When I say guppies, I mean the tiny little fishies that you might see in a stream.  The whole fish, head and everything.  Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my actual camera, so I will have to make do with pictures taken by my phone. Not the best quality, but hopefully some descriptive language will help to really set the scene.

 I so wish I had a real camera so you could actually see the little heads and eyes and faces of the guppy coleslaw, or whatever this is. These little wormy things are actually whole mini fish.  The scary part is, you don't really notice that at first, so only until you are about to scoop some into your face do you see the little heads staring back at you. I didn't have the nerve to taste it, so it could be absolutely delicious.  I just couldn't do it.

We also got some "milky rice wine" that came in a plastic liter bottle, and you drank out of what I usually think of as cereal bowls.  I think Joanna was expecting an actual bottle of wine, and when it came we were confused.  It had 2 inches of sediment at the bottom, so she shook it up, then we got nervous about an explosion.  I asked the waitress if it would explode and she looked at me like I was totally retarded.  It was very sweet and milky.

This magical lump is what I call fruitcake potato salad.  It has the texture of creamy whipped potatoes with a lot of mayonnaise, and then it has bits of what appear to be canned vegetables.  They add nice little spots of color that make the eating experience so much more exciting.

More appetizers.  Mostly various vegetables and egg bits covered in red sauce that I will call Korean Ketchup.  That last one is Joanna eating sprouts.  She was thrilled.

There was also the ever popular fish pancake, which is mostly green onions and various seafood mashed into a pancake shape and fried to hell.  It's decent, but REALLY greasy and when I say seafood, I mean chewy white hunks of things.

Melissa and Katie got some sort of Noodle Dish.  It was noodley!

 We got veggie BiBimBop with a fried egg on top!  When I am forced to go for Korean, this is my usual.  It was just OK this time, but I have had it at another place where it was actually delicious and I wasn't even completely drunk when I ate it! It also reminds me of the song we had to sing at Jewish Day camp... Bim Bam bim bim bim bam, bim bim bim bim bim baaammmmm....shabbat shalom HEY! and so on.

The birthday girl got BBQ!  This place was less exciting than the other Korean place we sometimes go to, because that place actually uses a blow dryer (like the kind you use for your hair) to blow air into the burner and really get the fire going.  The place we were at tonight actually had hotplates, which I guess could be seen as a more sanitary way to cook your meats, but way less fun.

Because this is Lumpkin's birthday, of course there was a Hagen Daz ice cream cake!  AND EVEN marshmallows and circus peanuts with candles!!!

The writing on the cake was done in this really concentrated blue gel frosting.  It got everywhere.

Delicious!  Then we all felt really sick.  Imagine the mess of Korean food with a layer of ice cream floating on top all mixing around in your stomach.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LUMPS!   Please pick a different theme next year!!!!!