So in my writeup of Korean hot pots a couple weeks ago, there was one restaurant I mentioned but didn’t get to. Two readers wrote in to tell me about Green Garden, located not far from the Central Market in Shoreline. On its sign out front, Green Garden advertises nothing of its housemade soondae, but when you look at the menu and the wall specials, the blood sausage is clearly the restaurant’s specialty. A friend and I met Eric and Kye earlier this week for a soondae hotpot. It wasn’t quite the same as the other stews I tried. Green Garden’s junggol section lists tripe junggol and budae jjigae, but we settled on the soondae bokum, sauteed blood sausage, liver, and two kinds of noodles in a deep red sauce that sizzled away at the table.Soondae’s one of those foods I haven’t yet fallen for, but it’s not because it’s blood sausage. (Lord knows I love a little hemoglobin.)You know how you’re supposed to introduce someone to a strange new foodby letting them taste it before you tell them what it is? Well, when Iwas an exchange student in Belgium, all the sausage stands sold achoice between boudin blanc and boudin noir, and I learned to like”black pudding” before I learned that it was mostly cooked-down blood. Soondae,though, I just think is bland. The sausage is stuffed with a mix ofpork blood and rice, barley, or, in Green Garden’s case, sweet-potatonoodles, so the rich meatiness of the blood is often diluted (theblood-sausage-stuffed squid pictured on Wikipedia’s soondae entry looks fantastic). I actually liked the soondae more in the soondae bokum. Mixed as it waswith caramelized onions, sweet and firey gochugang, and the occasionalhit of fragrant chrysanthemum leaves, the sausage absorbed andreflected the richnesss of the other ingredients. Bonus ingredient: Thebokum also contained dduk, tube-shaped rice cakes whose texture always reminds me of marshmallows. Eric and Kye aren’t as fond of the current Green Garden owners’ sausageas the previous one’s. Their recommendation was to hit the soondae stand in thePal-Do World in Lynnwood, which sells take-home plates of the sausage withits traditional accompaniment of chile-spiked salt (there’s another soondae specialist in Federal Way called Soondae Nara). Next time I drive north, I’llpop in.Green Garden, 15740 Aurora Ave. N., Shoreline, 361-7478.Also, by way of appendices, my friend Christen sent me photos of our goat stew at Sam Oh Jung, so if you were a little alarmed by the description (as one of my non-offal-loving friends was), that’s because you didn’t see the stew or, more importantly smell it. The stew, right before it started bubbling:See? Goat intestines aren’t so scary. And here’s the panchan, which I thought were great: