Looking up the Alton Brown recipe, I see sage, thyme, black pepper, rosemary, nutmeg, cayenne pepper, red pepper flakes, and brown sugar. He may have more than one recipe, but that's what I found.

I prefer sage, black pepper, white pepper, nutmeg, mace, and ginger. I see AB calls for fresh sage leaves, but I use ground (powdered) sage--and I use a lot of it. Although I love spicy varieties of sausage, I do not care for spicy breakfast sausage, so I do not use any cayenne, red pepper flakes, etc. I also omit sugar.

How do I achieve "lively"? Well, for one thing I use considerably more of each spice than the recipe requires, sometimes almost double, such as with the ground sage.

The only way to determine what you prefer is to experiment. People on the Internet can't tell what tastes good to you. Fortunately, this is the fun part of cooking.

I know this is not an authoritative answer (because nobody can give you one), but I suspect many people eat just the kind of frozen tuna in your picture, from H-Mart, Costco, etc., sashimi style. That does not mean it's safe--just that many people apparently take the risk. Some may get sick--who knows. As hotoynoodle points out, the texture (and likely flavor) will not be as nice as you are accustomed to, but that is the tradeoff of buying economical frozen tuna. Defrost it slowly in the refrigerator. The last time I bought tuna like this and ate it raw, I swore I would never do it again--the flavor and texture were just really poor.

Searing the outside would indeed address the potential problem of bacterial contamination, as you suggest. Again, it's all about probabilities, and nobody has enough data to tell you what the probability is of any given piece from, say, H-Mart having enough bacteria on the outside to make a person sick.

I stopped into Skylight the other day, and I have to agree with your description: "I compared the texture of the meat to chunky peanut butter, and to something that had been pre-digested." Just TOO finely chopped. Apparently unlike you, I enjoy a bit of crackling mixed in. However, to me the appeal of crackling is that it adds some textural variety. I prefer to find pieces of crackling that vary in size/shape. However, in this case, everything is chopped so finely that the crackling, too, is reduced to uniform bits hardly larger than coarse grains of salt.

A nitpick, but the sauce that was pre-mixed into the meat was just not quite spicy enough for my taste. The bottles on the table provided the solution. By shaking them well, I could get some chili flakes to come out.

Slaw is characteristically sweet and completely not to my taste. I hate sweet slaw, but that's what you get in this region. When it comes to barbecue, I guess I don't like anything sweet at all, because the whole appeal to me of Eastern NC style over styles with a tomato-ey sauce or a rub that contains sugar is the replacement of sweetness with vinegary sourness. I did not eat more than a half fork-full of slaw, and tossed the rest out.

What is up with that leaden "cornbread"?! The menu said it came with "bread," so I was expecting the usual slice of white bread. You could hurt someone if you threw a piece of that dense "cornbread" at them. It was as though it were made of concrete. A greasy, fried slab of concrete. Absolutely gross. I tossed that out, too.

I don' think you would enjoy eating dried anchovies after cooking them, as they would be mushy. It is common in Southeast Asia to use the tiny ones as a garnish--sprinkle on rice or whatever to add flavor and texture. In Korean restaurants you might get a bowl of them on the table to snack on. The larger ones are good for making fish stock--dashi, I guess it would be called in Japanese (though Japanese dashi uses bonito, not anchovy, if I'm not mistaken). Not sure what it's called in Korean, but same principle. The fish are discarded from the strained stock because, well, they're not very appetizing after cooking.

I see a link to maangchi.com was posted, and I assume she more than covers what Koreans do with dried anchovies. I make her recipe for soondubu jigae with anchovy broth every once in a while, so I keep a supply of these in the pantry. Ooh, now that I think about it, the ones covered in sweet chili are delicious snacks.

I have tried using less water, yes, but not the ultra-low water method I believe you're referring to. But why should that be necessary? As I understand it, cooking pasta in a very small volume of water is a recent invention by experimental cooks. I have been led to believe Italians have been successfully making cacio e pepe with pasta boiled in traditional amounts of water for a very long time. Why is it that so many cooks today--at least judging by the published recipes I have seen--are resorting to some sort of emulsifier, such as butter or egg yolk? Some recipes call for large amounts of butter. Preparing cacio e pepe the ultra-simple way I imagine (incorrectly?) Italians doing it has eluded me every time I have tried it. Clumpy cheese, never smooth and sauce-like, etc.

"Cultural appropriation" is getting a lot of press these days, but I haven't been aware of a food-related instance causing an uproar, so thanks for posting about this. I would think that food is one area in which cross-pollination is so well-established that it's beyond question. It's common for chefs to seek formal or informal training outside their native country and return to open a restaurant featuring the cuisine from the place they trained. Yeah, in Portland you people have Andy Ricker as a prime example.