Toji Korean Grill

We went to Toji Korean Grill on SE Hawthorne last night. We decided to go out, and were walking toward Hawthorne when it occured to us to go there. It was a good idea.

Toji is a Korean grill, meaning they fire up a little grill in the middle of your table, and you order raw, marinated meat to char up yourself. We got a value meal of sorts. There were 3 of them, sort of buried under more expensive options. Ours was the medium size. It came with tofu/seafood soup, grilled tofu patties, and 6 pork pot stickers for appetizers. The soup was good, albeit somewhat fishy if you're not into that. The grilled tofu was, unsurprisingly, a little bland. But if you like tofu, you'll like this. It came with three dipping sauces: sesame oil, a sweet teriyaki, and a plum sauce. I liked it just fine. The pot stickers were steamed, not fried. I thought they were pleasantly gingery, but not overpowering.

The meal came with a bevy of pickled Korean delights. I'll try to list all of them... Kim Chi, which you will never convince me is good. Also: a tasty but spicy spinach/red pepper mix, pickled sprouts, fish stick thingies, garlic and jalapenos, green beans, soft tofu, and bean paste. I think there were a few others too. These small dishes really complement the main dish.

Speaking of which, we really enjoyed our marinated, thin sliced ribeye. Our plate was full of meat, with two slabs of onion and a couple mushroom caps to grill alongside them. We let everything barbeque to varying degrees of done... wrapped the meat up with rice inside big leaves of lettuce, and added some of those other foods, to make tasty little wraps. As I said, we ordered the medium size, but could have easily gotten by on the small. We also got some nice Japanese beer, Kirin Ichiban, to drink.

Overall, I really like the experience at Toji. It's fun to grill up your own meat, and the splendor of all the dishes of food makes dinner seem like a big deal. The main drawback for me is that I'm only so-so on some of the flavors prevalent in Korean food. I don't care for Kim Chi, no matter how many times I try it. This restaurant is a once every six months kind of place.

Mango Pork

Taking a detour from my planned route... I'm rating a recipe we tried last night. Not so much a recipe, but a winged culinary concoction. The wife went grocery shopping, and found banana leaves at the store. Naturally she bought a pack. Last night we made mango pork with them. For the uninitiated, banana leaves are traditionally used in Thai, Filipino, and other Asian cooking to keep meat moist. It's sort of like wrapping meat in tin foil. We had never used them before, but it's pretty easy.

In this recipe, we used pork chops (because our local grocery store only carries family packs of chicken, which is like 2 dozen breasts). We chopped up Walla Walla sweet onions, red peppers, and mangoes, then mixed those chunks with rum and mango juice. We spooned out a healthy heaping of that mixture one on banana leaf, put the pork chop on top, then put larger chunks of the veggies and fruit on top of that. Then, we wrapped one banana leaf around the food, then used another leaf going the other way. We used wooden skewers to pin the corners of the leaves closed, then baked the meat at 350 degrees. After about 40 minutes, I checked one of the packages. It was still undercooked. So we turned the heat up to 400, and left them in for another 15 minutes or so. The one I unwrapped was good, but the one whose seal was unbroken was much more moist.

I'd really recommend trying to make something with banana leaves. They give a flavor to the food you won't get with foil. Next time we'll maybe try to make a light curry or something with chicken or fish. Anybody else tried cooking with leaves?