A Small Amount of Kale Kimchi

One bunch of kale and 3 carrots yields about 2 cups of kimchi

Carrots and kale abound in our garden, although for this experimental round of kale kimchi, I used the kale and carrots that came in my weekly CSA box. The idea is that in the near future, I can make kimchi from all the things growing in my garden, sans ginger and garlic. Oh, I know I can grow garlic here because other people do, but my garlic turns out wormy. Two seasons of wormy garlic and my drive to continue growing it is in the gutter. 

Carrots and Russian red kale

Loosely, I followed this recipe. I salted my kale and carrots instead of drizzling them with fish sauce, and I added 1 T of hot Korean chili powder and 2 T of Korean chili flakes. I also added minced ginger and reduced the sugar.

Reducing sugar intake has been a thing around here thanks to reading Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar and Salt, Fat, Sugar: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. Admittedly, I am one bummer of a dining companion right now because I'll tell you how putting that sugar- and carb-laden dessert in your mouth will mess up your liver. Oddly, people don't want to talk about it, although I find it fascinating and I just bring it up because I think my companion will think it's fascinating as well and not because I am admonishing that person's choice of food. Apparently, I am out of control because the boy will come home, grab a beer, and go into another room as fast as he can so I won't talk to him about liver damage and visceral fat. He's glad that I'll be reading Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation next.

Beautiful red pepper paste made with fish sauce, rice flour, ginger, and garlic

More cooking thank knitting has been happening in these parts. I thought I'd be sick of cooking since we pulled off a party for 30 people with only 1 day of preparation and lovely friends who all pitched in, but it actually fired me up again. (You must make a Green Glove cocktail!) Well, that and the longer days. Staying inside and cooking when it is sunny outside is more appealing than staying inside and cooking when it is cloudy outside, although it makes no sense to me since I'm indoors in both scenarios. I guess I like the view best when it's sunny.

Tonight's dinner is pork belly braised with soy sauce, Chinese rice wine, star anise, cinnamon, dried chills, and plenty of ginger and garlic. The two pound pork belly from our meat CSA was beautiful, and I used half of it for a kimchi stew and the other half for this Chinese stew.

Time to eat! I hope you all have a wonderful summer!

2013: The Year of (More) Fermentation

Happy 2013, everyone! Lots of experimentation has been going on in these parts, and most of them have to do with food. Of course. I made a beautiful watermelon radish water kimchi, a lightly fermented kimchi that only sits out for a day or two before going into the refrigerator. You eat both the radish and you drink the brine, but I am loving the way this full jar looks on my countertop. I had watermelon kimchi at FuseBox in West Oakland, and since my CSA box is full of radishes, I decided to attempt this kimchi myself.  There's a crock full of cabbage kimchi bubbling away, too, and it will probably go fast because anything spicy is in high demand during our (relatively) cold winter. (I know you snow folks laugh, but a high of 52 degrees F? Brrrrrrrr! This is the Bay Area - I didn't sign up for that!)

Sitting next to my kimchi is what I lovingly refer to as my Kitchen Sheik. It's the start of a kombucha SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast - sounds appetizing, eh?). I was drinking one of those $3 bottles of raw kombucha when I got really irritated that just paid $3 for something that I could make myself. My mom and grandmother used to make kombucha, and I kid you not, but it started to turn my mother's hair black again! Although this is not why I like it, I find the tangy taste addictive, I wouldn't mind it if  my gray hair ceased to exist. So I dumped half of my kombucha drink into some cooled jasmine tea. It's almost been a week, and it smells right. I'll have to add some more tea and sugar to feed it so it can grow stronger.

I wonder if my taste for kombucha has to do with the yoga DVDs I've been using? Or is this like Cabbage Patch Kids, where at first I think they're ugly, but then because all the cool kids have it I want one too?

An interesting side note is that there is kombucha beer from Unity Vibration in Michigan. I've had the ginger beer, gluten free by the way, twice! Both times, it hit the spot. It's a good beer to pair with Asian food, especially spicy food.

Since all my fermentation projects take weeks, I made some lemon cauliflower pickles (recipe here) for some instant gratification. They're lemony, pickley, and crisp!

Beet roasting was also on today's agenda. There's nothing revolutionary here, but I do love the chioggia beet's style.

We have so much beer brewing here it is ridiculous. By the end of today, we will have 20-gallons of beer in carboys. 2 of those carboys are going to be tied up for a year since the boy is experimenting with sour beers. The other 2 carboys house a black lager and a Stone 12.12.12. Stone brewery is awesome in that they post their special beer recipes for free, so when we were wowed by a glass of 12.12.12 on draft, we immediately bought the ingredients and made some for ourselves. I think our version is going to taste more like cloves, so it will be a winter beer.

I have developed a perplexing craving for red meat, specifically burgers. Could it be the Cabbage Patch effect again since gourmet burger joints are the food media's darling? I've dragged the boy to burgers at the FiveTen truck, Elevation 66, Hopscotch, Burger Bar, True Burger, and Eureka! Burger.  I also had a kick ass hanger steak (they didn't even ask me how I wanted it - it came out deliciously rare) at Mill Valley Beerworks. Since I've been traditionally a lean meat and veggie person, I worry that I have a brain tumor because it's such a radical shift from what I normally crave. If I start becoming good at picking up different languages and I have a sudden love of raw onions, I'll know something bad is up.

The New Normal

So, it has been 1 month since Vespa was last here, and we're all adjusting in our own way. Thank you for all the kind comments - it was comforting to read them and I would often find myself reading them over and over when I was having a particularly hard moment. 

Mingus was in a funk for a few weeks, which gave us something to focus on other than our own grief. We bought him a bed of his very own instead of the pathetic old bath towels that we place around the house for him. The bed was a hit... With the cats.

Greaseball, now the undisputed lord of the house, especially enjoys the bed and is quite pleased that we abandoned the raggedy old towels.

These tiny woofers also enjoyed Mingus's toy box and his bed. One thing that we couldn't do when Vespa was around was have guest dogs to our house. She was very territorial, and we could think of few things less awkward than having to apologize about our dog beating up a friend's dog. Mingus isn't territorial about anything or anyone, so he's been a perfect host.

Perhaps because he is still not in his right mind, the boy volunteered to go to his first ever college football game. Cal lost (OK, we got slaughtered), he got heckled by a rabid Duck fan (but thankfully since he didn't care, the lady lost interest and moved seats), and he found it curious that I was singing fight songs and pumping my fist in the air at what seems to him random intervals. Being scrutinized like some sort of sociological experiment while doing things that I know are silly and stupid somehow makes the experience of the college ball game diminish, but at least my friend was there to look silly and stupid with me. Go Bears! We'll do better at basketball this season.

Crisp winter weather brings kimchi cravings front and center. I let my last batch age until it was really sour, and then made kimchi stew 3 times in the past couple of weeks and tried my hand at kimchi pancakes. My first pancakes were too loose, so my second try involved adding an egg and some cornstarch to make the pancake extra crispy. While version 2 was better, it's still not quite right. When I suggested making kimchi pancakes for brunch last weekend, the boy sadly asked if we could eat normal breakfast with regular pancakes and bacon and if we could please not have any kimchi in our brunch. Since my stock response is that I will eat anything he makes, we had pumpkin pancakes that day. How boring, but I guess we have been eating kimchi at every meal since I'm in experimentation mode.

This kimchi pancake only looked good in the pan. It fell apart when I flipped it.

Have you ever been to the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley? They have free tours once a month, so as long as you sign up early (we're talking months ahead of time), you can observe some cool classroom action and check out a sweet garden. The tour is mostly aimed towards the program policy, and while I was hoping that it was more about  the plants, I still found it all fascinating.

The man in the corner is made of playing cards

I have compost bin envy. And I want an army of children to help me turn it.

My knitting needles have been on fire lately. This hat was hastily knit because while trying to slink by the local pedicure place (I haven't been there in months), one of the owners saw me and followed me to the next door cafe. Although that soundes really creepy, she was being very sweet because she wanted to invite me to a baby shower that was in 2 days. Since I cannot bear to give babies store bought things, I whipped up a vanilla, stockinette cap and added a couple of crocheted flowers to jazz it up. Those flowers probably took me longer than the hat since I've been really tense, and crocheting was a challenge since I had trouble pulling my hook through the loops.

Another reason my needles are smoking is because I'm knitting samples for an upcoming trunk show! I was contacted by the owner of The Yarn Boutique in Lafayette to see if I'd be open to the idea, and since I was, I picked out some yarn and have been knitting away. Date is TBD since my crafting time has been rather limited due to work and life, but I'll let y'all know when it goes down. Stay tuned...

Just Another Lazy Day

While others are sweltering in heat waves, the Bay Area still hasn't made up its mind yet about summer. When the days are sunny rather than overcast and foggy, I throw the windows open so everyone can get a sip of summer before it goes away.

Overcast weather puts me in the mood to cook and craft, so I'm not that put out by the lack of sunshine. Another batch of kimchi was made, this time with some chili powder that packed a punch. I tempered the heat by adding fat and carbs. Voila! Kimchi fried rice with bacon and eggs. Brown rice is the standard here, and I love how Japanese brown rice transforms into little bites of mochi when it's fried.

Inspired by my Portland food truck excursion, I've been experimenting with this Bosnian pita recipe (burek). This is my first excursion into laminated doughs, and I have a lot more learning to do. Lesson number 1 was to not be stingy with the fat. Since I didn't put enough olive oil onto my rolled out dough, my first try wasn't laminated. It was rock solid. Still, I ate it, because hot bread with a tasty beef filling can't go too wrong. Try number 2 was much better once I let the fat flow.

 

Someday, I will remember not to cut into my food before I take a blog picture.

I have some ground lamb earmarked for try number 3. I'm thinking of seasoning the lamb with preserved lemons, cumin, and dried apricots.

Cloudier days put me in a knitting and picture taking mood, so the dogs dutifully modeled some baby hats for me. Again, it's baby season. This season, I have a whopping 7 babies popping out in September. January was a busy month.

Here's a better picture of the hat. It's the Upside-Down Daisy hat (rav link). I'm not happy with the petal edges. I think I'll improvise and crochet the petals next time so they look more finished. Other daisy hats on Ravelry look just fine. What's the trick? Maybe I should have whip stitched around the edges of the petals instead of basting.

And here's a better picture of Mingus. This picture captures his goofiness much better, but his ginormous head is blocking the hat. He's still waiting for a thought. It helps to cross your eyes ever so slightly when waiting for a thought to land.

Kimchi Shortage!

Obviously, the kimchi shortage is not in our house, but South Korea is experiencing a shortage due to a wet cabbage growing season.

You can read more about it here.

Perhaps I should start exporting my kimchi?

Constantly Eating

Since the projects on my needles and hook are long term, there's nothing much to show. WIP photos aren't really interesting to me, so I assume that anyone who checks in won't find them interesting as well. However, I am constantly eating, so I do have some more food finds to share.

Today at the market, I bought these two jujubes. I didn't want to read up much on them before I tasted them, so I just dove right in. They remind me of apples, but they are sugary sweet with no tartness to offset their sweetness. Their texture is more snappy than apples. I've encountered dried jujubes in the medicinal soups my dad makes and in teas, but never fresh. They were quite good, but more of a dessert than a fruit.

 

I think my kimchi craze is waning, so I wanted to recombine all my leftovers into something new to use up the stray bits. Fried rice was yesterday's solution since I had egg whites leftover from making a miso caramel ice cream, spicy chicken and brown rice leftover from the previous day's dinner, and the always present cabbage kimchi in my fridge.

I have some koji that's just begging to be turned into miso or amazake. For those of you in the Bay Area, Berkeley Bowl West sells a pint of koji for around $5 - the price is low enough to experiment with abandon. This will probably be my next project unless something else shiny comes around.

The Kimchi Chronicles

 

The kimchi making bug still has me obsessed, which means that dinner still consists of some sort of grilled meat, short grain brown rice, and an assortment of banchan. Since summer in the Bay Area is having an extinction burst, these meals are perfect for a day when you just want to throw something together and call it dinner, especially if the rice was made earlier and only requires a jaunt in the microwave. The banchans are made on different days, but they are all meant to live long, nonperishable lives. At various times I've thought about how lovely it would be to have a refrigerator dedicated to banchan, a staple in so many Korean households, but those thoughts are shortly chased away by the reality of my living situation: only 2 people to feed, we already own an extra freezer in the garage, no room to put a chest refrigerator anywhere, and I have no idea how much longer my banchan obsession will last.

The last round of cabbage kimchi consisted of Napa cabbage, radish, and carrots as the base vegetables. I used up the last of my Mexican chili powder (I think it was ancho?), so I treated myself to a trip to the Korean grocery market to pick up some more staples: gochujang, doenjang, and some Korean chili flakes. (For those of you in the Bay Area, Koreana Plaza is a fun field trip, but beware alert in the parking lot because there's a lot of backing up without looking going on!)

Grocery shopping with the boy means that we'll end up with some random food item that will require some research to use up. During this trip, he grabbed a bag of dried fiddlehead ferns and this bag of either dried squid or dried cuttlefish. He could not resist the drinking squid or the promise that this squid would go good with beer. What a sucker.

Thankfully, a little web search pulled up plenty of recipes for the dried squid. Maangchi is a wonderful resource for Korean food, and the added videos and cute commentary can easily absorb your afternoon. I used her recipe for seasoned dried shredded squid (ojingeochae muchim), and I'm happy to report that it is delicious! The squid is right: it is perfect with beer. My only change to the recipe was to substitute brown rice syrup for the corn syrup, and I used canola oil instead of olive oil (olive oil? really?).

Another banchan I made are these stewed black beans (kong jang). These are what I go nuts over at Korean BBQ restaurants, and they turn out to be a snap to make. My only changes to the recipe was to omit the corn syrup and to add an equal amount of sugar towards the end of the cooking time. Also note the the black beans are black soybeans (edamame), not the black turtle beans commonly available here. If you cannot find dried black soybeans, you may substitute regular soybeans. The tricky bit is that when you go to a Chinese or Korean market, "black beans" usually refers to the black soybeans. If you want to make sure, inspect the package of dried black beans. The skin is black, but the flesh underneath is a pale green.

Can anyone explain to me why there is so much corn syrup in Korean recipes? I tried to buy a gochujang without it, and it was impossible. I'm sure that Korean grandmothers weren't using the stuff 100 years ago, so what gives? Is this simply a matter of economics? I notice that other recipes use malt/barley syrup, too. Luckily, I have a jar of brown rice syrup from some long ago recipe, and that does the trick.

Since I bought a package of Korean chili flakes, I was chomping at the bit to make this cucumber kimchi (oisobagi kimchi). It's currently sitting in the back office, the coolest spot in the house, fermenting for a day. It was good right away, but it will be even better once it the flavors meld more and there's a bit of lactic acid in the mix.

Now, it's time for props. There are a number of fantastic Korean websites out there that I have been reading over and over again for recipes, brand recommendations, and inspiration.

• http://www.maangchi.com/
• http://oneforkonespoon.wordpress.com/
• http://weekofmenus.blogspot.com/p/korean-recipes.html

Thursdays are for Pickles and Kimchi

After starting off the morning taste testing yet another eggs Benedict , this time from Jimmy Beans  (I had the Eggs Blackstone and it was not stellar, but solid), I did my produce shopping, and then spent the rest of the afternoon making pickles and kimchi.

This afternoon's batch of kimchi features daikon, carrots, and of course Napa cabbage as the stars, and loads of garlic, ginger, green onions, fish sauce, and tiny dried shrimp as the supporting actors. Also, there was a healthy dose of chili powder. I'm almost through with my package of arbol chlii powder, and once that is gone, I'll treat myself to the real deal chili flakes from the Korean market. Although, I do like the idea of sourcing some California grown dried chili flakes, so I'll take a look around before loading up my cart at the Korean market.

I also put together another batch of Mexican carrot pickles, this time with more garlic cloves. Surprisingly, until my friend popped one of the pickled garlic cloves into her mouth, I never had the guts to try them myself. I imagined that they'd be overwhelmingly pungent and that people would part like the Red Sea when I approached. However, to my delight, they had a crunchy texture and the garlic "bite" was mild. Yum! I won't be pushing the garlic cloves to the side of my plate anymore.

One little trick I tried was to soak my whole garlic cloves for a couple of hours before taking off their papery husk. When I cook with garlic, I usually smash them with the side of my knife and then remove their husk, but for the pickles I wanted them to be intact and pretty. It was so much easier to peel the garlic after their water bath!

Another batch of Japanese cucumber salt pickles are on the counter, too, in my cool pickle press. I'll probably mix them with some dry farmed Early Girl tomatoes tomorrow.

One impulse buy were these gobo (burdock) roots. They were advertised as organic, and since I find so many Asian vegetables hard to find in organic form (lotus root, for example), I pounced on them. I'm going to make a gobo root kinpira tonight, using the same technique and marinade as my lotus root kinpira.

When I went to feed my pet worms all the vegetable food scraps, I happened upon the worm invader. It's stupid, but I am terrified of this slimy salamander. I'm getting better - I can take a picture of it now instead of slamming the lid on the worm bin and screaming for the boy to feed the worms.

Mingus remains unimpressed with this afternoon's activities, but he's a dog. What does he know? (He knows that he doesn't like kimchi or pickles. You can bet if I was making a batch of pork potstickers he'd be sitting outside of the kitchen sniffing the air with a happy face.)

Kimchi, Dead Fish, and Dog Butt

Behold, the saltiest meal on the planet! Not only do we have a few brined kimchis, but there is the Japanese curry made from spicy Kokumaro curry roux blocks. (For those who were following the my Japanese curry chronicles, Java Curry is the winner. Vermont Curry was bland, and Kokumaro was a close second.)

We hosted an impromptu kimchi and sour beer dinner gathering last Saturday. Sadly, I don't have any pics or notes from the sour beer tasting, but I can ask the boy and post results if anyone is sour beer fan.

I polled the dinner guests to see which kimchi was their favorite, but it the answers were evenly distributed. The most familiar and complex tasting kimchi was definitely the napa cabbage kimchi.

I let this kimchi ferment for a few days in the kitchen, but when the days got warmer, I moved the jar to a cooler room. Total fermentation time was 1 week. The tang and spice level was just right!

The cucumber and daikon kimchis did not need to ferment for very long. Some recipes I consulted said that they were ready as soon I they were finished, and to leave them in the refrigerator for a stronger flavor. Some of the daikon recipes required one to four weeks of fermentation. I suppose it depends on how long you are going to store them and the strength of your brine (lactobicillus, the bacterium that gives the kimchi its characteristic tang, can live in salty environment, but the more salt added, the slower the bacterium grows). I fermented both kimchis for 2 days.

I actually remembered to whip out the camera during my kimchi making frenzy.




For the cucumbers, I started with 1.5 lbs of Persian cucumbers.


Once they cucumbers were quartered, I tossed them into a nonreactive bowl (no metal) and I added 2 T of kosher salt.

Look at all the brine! This picture was taken 3 hours after I salted the cucumbers. I let them sit for a few more hours before adding the rest of the spices.


I tossed the brined cucumbers with some green onions, 1 T fish sauce, 1 T sugar, 1 T chili powder, and 6 cloves of minced garlic. They turned out crunchy, sweet, and salty! Before I served the cucumber kimchi, I sprinkled a little bit of roasted sesame oil over them. If I had toasted sesame seeds, I would have added those as well.


Besides the kimchi, I frantically finished a mini Dead Fish Hat for a baby shower. This project was fantastic for stash busting! I used so many odds and ends of my Tahki cotton stash.



Instead of using felt for the eyes, I crocheted a couple of circles with kitchen cotton. The boy was kind enough to sew on the eyes since I detest hand sewing.

As a final note, this is why we shouldn't hang towels on the oven. Ahem... (You know who you are!)