Kogiya: Limited Options but a Lot of Heart

Best word(s) to describe barbecue at Kogiya: fatty, fatty, fatty.  How fatty?  See photo:

Kogiya is touted as one of Northern Virginia's finest in Korean BBQ, and who am I to disagree?  Kogiya gives you two great all-you-can-eat selections!  Plus, 1) I have no idea how a Korean foodie would think Korean BBQ should be and 2) I have only had it twice in this area and no more times in my life than I can count on both hands.  In contrast, I submit my experience with Chinese food.

So with this caveat, I judge Kogiya to be "extremely" two things: tasty and limited in options.  Kogiya does a great job with taste because they prepare their marinated meats with phenomenal flavor.  Of course, it helps when the only cuts of meat you serve on the grill are the fattiest cuts, but that is not a demerit on taste.  That is, however, illuminating with regard to the breadth of Kogiya's options, or lack thereof.  With option A, you get unlimited quantities of five types of meat, of which only chicken is "lean."  The other four option A selections are fatty beef brisket, three-layer pork belly, miso pork belly, and spicy pork belly.  With option B, you get to tack on small intestine, large intestine, and tripe.  So in two words: deliciously fatty.

From a business standpoint, I thought this makes a lot of sense because these all-you-can-eat options easily stand at the intersection between customer satisfaction and satiating even the most voracious appetites with a "less is more" approach.  Of course the fattiest cuts are going to be the tastiest morsels sizzling on a grill, so why not load up on just those cuts to the pure delight of every dinner guest?  And let's be honest, folks eating out at KBBQ are giving themselves a freebie on any sort of diet.  With respect to the "less is more" approach, what better meat is there to fill up bellies quickly than the fattiest, richest cuts?  Lean meat just would not do the same job as three-layer pork belly.

What did I order?  Option A, because while I love tripe, I am not a huge fan of intestine, small or large.  The meal was more than satisfying, and I recommend it to anybody looking for a change of pace in Northern Virginia outside of Honey Pig.  Which would I pick by default if given an option: Honey Pig, because of vastly more choices.

Cakes and Vegetables 5: The Carrots Strike Back

A while back, my family attended a get-together with friends, and my parents asked me to put together a carrot cake for the event.  This time, I used a combination of my mother's food processor and actual stainless steel grater to prepare the carrots, which was a great learning experience.

It turns out that the food processor did not grate when set to "grate," and by the time all the carrot pieces were similar in size, there was only orange mush instead of gratings.  After 1.5 hours spent producing two cups of mashed carrots, the food processor was clearly not a significant improvement over the small plastic grater at my apartment.

On the other hand, the full-sized stainless steel grater worked wonders.  It quickly turned solid carrot into nice gratings in a uniform manner.  This, compared to the little plastic grater at my place, appeared to work miracles.  With extra gratings to spare, I decorated the top with orange "sprinkles" at my mother's suggestion.  These gratings, it turns out, played a key role in appealing to my audience.  Read on to find out why I believe so.

Interesting tidbit: many Chinese people of my parents' generation are practically allergic to added sugar.  That is to say, they probably consume in one week the amount of added sugar that is contained in the average 3-course American meal plus beverage, and only because they avoid added sugar at all cost.  Given these unfounded assumptions, the average Chinese adult would consume 21 times less sugar than his/her American counterpart.

So why is that important in a discussion about carrot cake?  Because I was at an event with many Chinese adults of my parents' generation, and that little tidbit was the one hurdle that would deter them from stuffing their face with risen sugar and butter.  The cool thing was that my mother helped me overcome that hurdle by suggesting I sprinkle extra carrot gratings on top of the buttercream frosting.  My hypothesis on the psychological effect of this action: the cake appeared less likely to induce a heart attack, and a little more likely to provide a great source of beta-carotene straight out of the Earth.

The cake, it turns out, was a huge success, and later, I made the same cake to bring into the office.

IPA Gives Me Wings

I do not remember where it came from...  I do not even know how it got there...  Yet somehow for over a year now, there have been bottles of IPA comically chilling in my refrigerator.  What a shame, I keep on telling myself, since IPAs seem to be all the rage in the American craft beer community.  What a shame, because it is hard to describe the horror I feel when the bottle in my hand touts its "homicidally hoppy" brew as its most redeeming feature.  So you might imagine every bottle remained untouched until this weekend, when I found a use for them: beer soaked chicken wings!! (Because the wings were on sale at the supermarket downstairs.)

I mixed one bottle of Lagunitas IPA with a dash of soy sauce, some lemon juice, and a ton of minced garlic and cilantro.  I marinated the wings in the mixture for 24 hours and then baked both sides of the wings for 30 minutes at 400 F.  I then sauteed the remaining marinade with a little bit of oil (also allowing some water to boil off) and drizzled it over the finished wings.  Review: finger-licking tasty, although next time I will cut out the soy sauce and use a beer-brine marinade.