Korean Food Exploration
 

I live a stone's throw from Garden Grove, CA, and have gazed longingly
at the hidden treasures of the Korean restaurants as we drive by. But
now we've actually started digging in and exploring these restaurants
to find what there is to eat. We know almost nothing. Sure, we know
kimchee, the tray-o-side dishes, and the bbq routine, all of which we
like. We also have been to the soft-tofu soup joints a few times.
Beyond that we don't know much.

So as we did in Westminster for a number of yesrs--hitting every
Vietnamese joint winding down long streets, and then all the Arabic
joints we could in Anaheim, we're now facing Little Korea. We've
recently started walking into any place that looks interesting and
since the folks are helpful and appreciative, and our tastes aren't
exclusionary in any way we've done well.

We've started hitting the food courts by the large supermarkets and
find a great deal of stuff about which we know nothing. Soups of many
kinds, for instance Nancy is a squash fan and had a great soup of this
kind. We also had a very thick chewy "rice-noodles" that have the
girth the size of a dime and are about two inches long. We see them for
sale in the supermarket proper as well. This one was in a spicy sauce
with green onions and stuff

Had a great pancake thing, as a side dish, at one of these stands:
inside is apple butter and a few small pieces of apple. Very tasty.

I'm working with a Korean Phrasebook (just to get the
please-and-thank-you down) and note the written language can be sounded
out with a few days work. So hopefully I'll be able to NAME some of
this stuff.

In any case, any aid/points will be appreciated. I'm thinking I might
be taking pictures of the food and/or the menus and/or the
point-and-nod pictures menus, etc. I'll post them somewhere on the web
for reference. The more modern newsreader's can segregate text from
images/mp3's so perhaps I can post image references here if that
doesn't start a flame war.

And so forth...
--
What a day this has been, what a rare mood I'm in.