Joe

I feel like everyone must have that friend who is so perplexing in the way they lead their personal and professional lives. Like the buttoned up manager who also drinks all their reports under the table, for example. In between raising our eyebrows and shaking our heads, we constantly forget Joe is also running his own company. Joe identifies as Korean. I met him at one of Kevin's rooftop bbqs - not sure which one, not sure how or when it stuck, but here we are, and I pretty frequently find myself wondering "why is he like this?"

Even Joe's childhood foods list had me stumped for the first time. As in, I couldn't form a cohesive dish in my mind. His list was like a series of things you'd find in one of those convenient suburban shopping complexes - pick up some groceries and a pizza for the kids on the way home from work orrr it's date night and we wanna try the new exotic kbbq joint and then get some ice cream for dessert kinda thing. No shade because that's exactly where I grew up too.

So after much uninspired back and forth with myself, I ended up with these kbbq cheeseburger n fries cabbage bundles.

Step 1: make the 'burger' meat. This is the filling. Except instead of ground beef, it's ground pork. And instead of garlic, salt, and pepper, it's garlic, gochujang, soy sauce, apple, brown sugar, rice vinegar, salt, and pepper for basically a kalbi marinade.

Step 2: make the fries. Cube up the potatoes so they wrap in with the meat seamlessly. Double fry them for optimum crispiness - more for your own snacking pleasure than anything else because they do disappear into the filling.

Step 3: blanch the cabbage leaves. I selected napa for optimal malleability vs structure, but I now don't see why white cabbage or oooh, purple cabbage, wouldn't work just as well.

Step 4: assemble.

Step 5: steam to cook ahead of time.

So what when you are ready to eat, you can just step 6: throw it over a flame to finish whether it's searing in a cast iron or... 

... charring on this cute little yakitori grill.

I recently went camping, which invariably means we spend an entire day slowly munching around a firepit. I brought a head of cabbage with me to throw right on the fire, letting it cook over a few rounds of Monikers. Apparently, not everyone is familiar with grilling a head of cabbage. Anything can be grilled, I said. Before we had anything else, we had fire, right?

The common theme here is grilling. Burgers sizzling on a grill, plumes of KBBQ smoke filling a room full of tabletop grills, yakitori literally means 'grilled chicken.' And we consumed these fat cabbage bundles in the quintessential city summer landscape - over a rooftop grill out.

At its core, a grill is a contained flame. It's function is to cook food using direct heat (indirect heat becomes BBQ or smoking), and how it applies that heat is where grill technology can vary. The more common grill options are either charcoal or gas, which affects things like flavor and cook time. Or you could opt for a hybrid grill, which sounds like the distant cousin to a Prius - using both gas and charcoal for efficiency without compromising the smoky charcoal flavor. Beyond fuel source, grills can get varied in material (stainless steel, ceramic, cast iron..) or parts (cover, grates, burner shape..) or accessories (temperature control, cleaning..) or add-ons (rotisserie arm, smoker..). I've never had to select and purchase a grill myself, but I think the options would give me indecision paralysis. So I'm just going to stick with my dinky little yakitori grill for 2.

But we have come a long way since a pit of fire. Like these examples of beautiful grills. *heart eyes emoji*

Things I would do differently: more cheese, way more cheese, always more cheese; cook the cabbage a little longer because the rib was still a bit tough (also select a prettier greener head of cabbage).

Joe's complete list:

bagel bites

chicken nuggets

fries

burgers

pizza

korean bbq

cheese

donuts

cold stone creamery