Galbi (Korean Barbecued Ribs)

Here's a little rib action for you, Korean style. This is what a typical barbecue place is kinda like around here. We're lucky sitting here in a booth rather than the floor like you do at a lot of Korean restaurants. At the center of the table is the ribs. They give them to you completly rare and you pretty much cook them yourself right there. Then they procede to give you 10,000 million side dishes all filled with some crazy stuff. There were side dishes ranging from the standard kimchi, radishes, and cabbage with thousand island to crazy weird things like mini raw crabs that you suck out of the shell. Whenever you finish one side dish, the waitress brings more. So there's a constant flow of stuff going around. In addition to the ribs, you also cook some garlic cloves and onions on the grill. Now to eat the ribs, you first grab one of those leaves in the metal dish. There were a couple of different ones, and I'll stress the fact that they are LEAVES. They kind of reminded me of the shape, texture, and taste of a fuzzy basswood leaf. Or maybe a big leaf aster...you know, the kind you use when you run out of TP. So you grab a leaf in your hand, use your chopsticks to grab a piece of rib, dip it, put it on the leaf, grab an onion, garlic, maybe throw something from a sidedish into the mix, wrap it up and shove it in your mouth, repeat. To be honest, the whole process is a lot of work. There's always something to do, make your leaf wrap, eat a side dish, turn the ribs. Plus the whole thing is hot. Not only spicy, but combine the charcoal grill with the summer heat and you've got a sweaty mess. After all that though, I love it. It's really really good. I just can't imagine washing all those little dishes!

The characters in the photo are our 'bus/van' driver and the two secretary/computer gurus.