By Alan Gore
For this month’s Shoestring Gourmet, we concentrate on presentation. Yes, folks, beautiful food. Presentation is always a factor in rating our Shoestring creations, but most diners get to see really great presentation only at restaurants where you go on out-of-town business visits, or with women not your wife, or to celebrate a major Powerball hit. This time, we’re going for the best amateur presentation our bulging Mensa minds can devise.
Because beauty itself will be this month’s criterion, we’re open on ethnic affiliation. We all know French cuisine as being among the prettiest, but less well known is that the Japanese bring the same sense of poetry to food preparation as they do to combat. Thai food comes in as many flowerlike hues as the women who prepare it. There are other cuisines which, though perhaps not as beautiful overall, offer elements of presentation you can use in composing larger arrangements. In Minnesota, all the food is white. In Ireland, the colors come in glasses. And don’t forget our native Indian corn.
Some of our regulars were on the road for the May Shoestring, but the rest of us put together a great Korean feast. Okay, one of our messiest, too. But the sauce wrestling it took to get going turned out to be worth it. Ray and Diana did bintaetok, or filled mung bean pancakes, with cho kanjang dipping sauce, and steamed rice. Ken brought his portable kitchen to prepare thin sliced marinated barbecued beef, kimchi, tofu with dipping sauces of hot mustard and soy sesame, and cucumber pickle. Pat Hull’s specialty was sin sul lo, fire hot beef and vegetables cooked in a Korean hot pot, which has a chimney at the center that you fill with red coals. This concoction contained – inhale deeply – beef, chicken, fish, meatballs, liver, daikon, carrots, beans, spinach, egg, mushrooms, and beef broth. Ursula cooked us pan-grilled halibut with Korean sauce, with an asparagus appetizer. Jane followed with cashew chicken and peppers.
Our locale for Saturday, June 14 will be the gracious and popular home of Sydele Golston, in that easy-to-reach part of Tempe where parking is not a capital offense. Because Syd travels a lot, please call Ursula Gore at 863-9648 by June 12 to coordinate dishes and get directions to Syd’s.