Growing napa cabbage and the art of making kimchi.

Incredibly different worlds collided when I worked in a Korean restaurant for several years while I was in college.  While employed, I developed a taste for kimchi, among other Korean cuisine.  However, the owner would not teach the employees how to make it.  I can't blame her, it was one of her secrets and a unique claim to fame, especially in the predominantly non-Korean environment of small town South Dakota.  I had fallen in love with kimchi, though, and when it dawned on me that I could grow most, if not all, of the ingredients, I had to make some for myself.  Besides, anything that goes that great with beer has to be incorporated into our diet.  With a little googling, I soon found that making kimchi was far from the mysterious, magical process I had envisioned when my Korean boss would disappear to the basement to make another huge batch of the spicy fermented cabbage.  In fact, it was quite simple.

One website in particular was helpful: http://drbenkim.com/how-make-kim-chi.htm

The instructions laid out by Dr. Ben Kim are clear, concise, and simple. I was delighted to find that the result of Dr. Ben Kim's recipe was very similar to that of my Korean boss.  The one setback was in obtaining the red pepper flakes, which were apparently only available from the website recommended by Dr. Kim, which happened to be unsecured.  At the risk of financial ruin, I went ahead and bought 6 bags of the red pepper flakes (I've used up one bad in three years) and watched my bank account like a hawk.  I didn't get ripped off, and I got the red pepper flakes.

This spring, my better half and I planted about 12 heads of napa cabbage, also called chinese cabbage, for the sole purpose of making our own kimchi.  We started our cabbage seeds on March 2, according to our gardening notebook (Get yourself a gardening notebook!  You will forget more than you remember from each gardening season, unless you have a photographic memory or something.  In that case, nevermind.).  We transferred them to the garden in the last week of March, which was earlier than expected because of a record setting warm spring.  We had plenty of aphids show up to munch on them, but routine applications of a soap/garlic solution (a topic worthy of its own post) helped keep them reasonably in check. 

We harvested our cabbage over the course of the last week or so.  We had some cabbage worm damage in some of the heads that were planted earlier (i.e. the oldest plants) and we had to cut off some of the heads.  We still had a solid harvest, though, with about 5 heads in great condition and some other heads with chunks cut off.  All the scraps and a few heads that were badly infested went over the fence into the chicken coop.  Nothing is wasted when you have chickens!  The bugs make for tasty protein supplements.

On to the kimchi!

We have made two batches of kimchi so far, each made 2 and a half quarts of the finished product.  The first batch was overly flavorful (a diplomatic way to put it) because I went heavy on the garlic and ginger - make that double heavy- and it was a bit strong.  Not to fear, however!  The solution to potent kimchi is to make one of the old boss's favorites, a pork and kimchi stew called kimchi chigae.  Don't ask me if I spelled that correctly.  It is a dish that was seemingly made for cold, rainy days.  If it is overcast and there is a chill in your bones, kimchi chigae will remove it.

To make it, you just brown up some fatty pork meat with a bone in it, such as country ribs or spare ribs such as in the photo.  Dump a bunch of kimchi in with the browned meat, add some water, sliced onions, and maybe some extra garlic and ginger.  If you're really feeling saucy, add some more of the red pepper flakes used to make the kimchi.  Boil for about 20 minutes, then simmer for another 45 minutes to an hour.  You can cook it for a shorter or longer periods of time, depending on how patient you are and how tender you like your meat.

Kimchi can be used in many other ways, such as in stir fry dishes or simply eaten plain, which is my personal favorite, especially when accompanied by an ice cold beer. 

Welcome to Not Exactly Homesteading!

Welcome to Not Exactly Homesteading!  What we mean by the name is that we try to live a more off the grid style of life without actually going off the grid.  We want to be free from the industrial food web, but we still want to have jobs.  We like our jobs.  Above all things, we try to be pragmatic.  We avoid pesticide use wherever possible, which is pretty much everywhere, but we don't try to be "organic" with our livestock or produce.  We figure that if it is grown at home, caught from a local lake or stream, or hunted from the landscape, it is of the highest quality.  Our taste buds tell us this is the case, and so do our waistlines.  So do our wallets. 

We kill deer, raise chickens for meat and eggs, catch fish, grow a huge garden, grow corn for food and feed, shoot gamebirds and waterfowl, pick wild asparagus, and compost everything.  But we also work 40 hours a week and buy some of our food, maybe 25%, from the grocery store.  We strive to find the balance between the simple joy recieved from providing for oneself and the comforts and safety of modern life.  We try to grow or harvest as many ingredients as we can, but we realize we can't produce them all.  For example, we don't want to buy a canned tomato ever again, but we love our dishwasher.  You don't have to go "off the grid" to have food of the highest quality at a bargain while minimizing your environmental impact and freeing yourself of the industrial food web.  You can know exactly where your meat, veggies, and grain came from, and it can be fun, especially if you love to cook.  We like to see our hard work in the garden, the field, or on the water translated to our plate.  We love being free from the confines of the inferior ingredients available at the grocery store.  Ours tastes better in almost every case.

So this is about food health, quality, and safety,  and reducing your environmental impact in any way possible.  But to be pragmatic about it.  Join us on our journey toward quasi-sustainability.  Share our successes and failures.  Hopefully we can develop a discussion community to lend insight to one another to get better at doing all the little things that make like more fulfilling and delicious.And we will try not to be too snobby or smug because of where our food comes from or how we live our lives, because we've all got some weeds in our garden.