Covid Cafe: Kimchi Kitchen

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One of six apple trees we planted:

Duchess of Oldenburg

 

Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world

John Muir

Good morning, chefs. What are you making today? Are you grilling or sauteeing or planning on having egg salad later on fresh greens (that's us)? Rob's back today with an undertaking he'd been putting off. Our cafe kitchen smells veddy spicy...

Rob writes: I’m challenging myself to make stuff I always thought I would make but never did.  Today, it’s kimchi. I was attracted to a recipe by a Korean gentleman who wrote about watching his mother make kimchi.

This is a hands-on process that calls for first massaging the salt into the cabbage.

Then cover with water and place a plate on top to weigh down the cabbage for the two-hour brine.  Nothing better than the large Costco olive oil jug I stole from Heidi and Art while watering their plants.

Then a triple rinse to wash off the brine.

 Next make the spice paste. Here ginger, garlic, gochugaru, some sugar, and fish sauce.

Stir that around while the cabbage dries a bit more and add the other vegetables, daikon radish and scallions.

Time to put on the gloves, add the cabbage, and massage the paste onto every surface of every ingredient.

The slaw has to ferment for about five days, with a push down each morning to release fermentation bubbles.  I’ll let you know how it all comes out.  

Find the recipe here.

Poetry

Moss-Gathering

By Theodore Roethke

To loosen with all ten fingers held wide and limber

And lift up a patch, dark-green, the kind for lining cemetery baskets,

Thick and cushiony, like an old-fashioned doormat, 

The crumbling small hollow sticks on the underside mixed with roots, 

And wintergreen berries and leaves still stuck to the top, —

That was moss-gathering. 

But something always went out of me when I dug loose those carpets 

Of green, or plunged to my elbows in the spongy yellowish moss of the marshes:

And afterwards I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road, 

As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;

Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,

By pulling off flesh from the living planet;

As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration. 

Mallow

Music

Fkj & Masego - Tadow