Portland, Oregon

This poor blog has been so neglected recently - I have been overwhelmed at work and home, but am now on a 3 week trip to Portland, Puget Sound, and Sonoita. Unbelievably, I forgot my camera, so my kind friend Zeborah took these photos for me when we went to a Korean restaurant. I've never been in a Korean restaurant before, the experience was very interesting and the food was fabulous!

We began with something called 'pot stickers', which are like little deep fried parcels of minced meat and vegetables, served with a soy dipping sauce.

The next course was the 'barbecue' itself - lots of small dishes arrived, containing shredded and sliced vegetables marinading in sweet rice vinegar - cucumber, shredded mouli or daikon radish, some bean sprouts, some kim-chee (I didn't eat that one as it was full of chilli), some thinly sliced pickled ginger (divine), some potato & carrot salad, some green beans with sesame seeds, and some sliced garlic & chilli peppers. Plus a bowl of sticky rice, some lettuce leaves and a plateful of thinly sliced pork & beef in a soy marinade. We cooked the meat on the barbecue and made 'wraps' of lettuce leaves stuffed with meat, rice, pickles and vegetables. It was all really yummy, if a bit messy to eat!

The little dishes:


The table full of food, and table barbecue:


The decor of the restaurant was interesting too - the top half of the walls was galvanised corrugated metal, and the chimneys above the tables with the corrugated metal gave the place a kind of industrial feel, but the light softened everything,and made the atmosphere welcoming:






Finally, the texture of the cast iron teapot stand was just too nice not to take a photo!