I'd love to take all of the credit for cooking some wicked steaks, but in truth, I didn't do very much at all. The steaks were marinated by Peter Gunstone sensei, and I think some of the ingredients were soy sauce, sugar, and some other stuff. The quality of the meat was top notch and all I know is they were purchased from Costco.
While digging through some old photos, I stumbled upon this little treasure that I had at a restaraunt called Ma Dang Coul located on Denman Street in Vancouver, BC. The dish is called Kalbi and it's basically beef short rib marinated in this magical sauce that tastes like.......happy. This little mom and pop style Korean restaraunt has some of the best kalbi I've ever had.
Of course, you get the usual assortment of side dishes like these sweet potatoes, kimchee, pickled radishes, pickled bean sprouts, seaweed etc.
Although I said September would be steak month, I'll throw in a little pork for variation. This is pork belly and essentially, you take it, throw it on a hot pan like so:
When our meals came a short time later, we were blown away. This thing was massive and the word massive doesn't really do it justice...and neither do the pictures. I could see our server straining under the sheer weight of our prime ribs. It literally dwarfed the plates they were served on. It was like the IJN Yamato sitting on top of a wood pallet. Isn't it glorious?
You can get an idea of how big this beast was by looking at a regular size prime rib in the background. The regular size looks like it wants to cry and run away.
Here's another shot from the side. More than triple a regular size.....I'd say it was easily double the size of a Keg-Size prime rib.
My pathetic contribution was bacon wrapped asparagus (did I spell that right?) and bacon wrapped enoki mushrooms, panfried.
Knifeboy cleaning the slab of meat that would be our dinner.
Cooked to perfection....blue rare....not for everybody.
Eventually, I decided to see what I could do and experimented a bit with various machines and equipment, different types of wood, and tried to make a bokken. People in class complained about my bokken because it was painted black (got it for 1,000 yen from a souvenir shop at a shrine in Matsushima, Japan) and left black marks on everyone elses' bokken. I needed something light, but strong enough to withstand tachiuchi excercises. I ended up making about half a dozen or so, all of varying sizes and shapes - no consistency whatsoever. I decided that these things were frackin hard to make and besides that, I stopped working at Stilewood.
The one on the left is strictly a show-piece made of African Mahogany, the dark one is made of Ipe, or Brazilian Ironwood, and so far, has not failed me yet. 
It's hard to tell the scale in the picture below, but if you look carefully, you can see a couple of standard size swords to the left of this monster.
So, I had to make one. I took those strips, cut them down to a uniform size and thickness, then lamenated them together on this really Micky Mouse rig I built. I let it cure over the weekend and began to shape this monster bokken. My coworkers thought I was nuts, and even I had to laugh when the thing started to take shape. It turned out pretty nice if I do say so myself. The layers of lamenate almost give it a faux hamon line. Anyways, I ended up donating the thing to our dojo summer party, it was auctioned off to one my classmates and the funds were used for future dojo events. 
The scale is hard to see in this picture, but Richard here is the tallest member of our dojo....
