Saturday, May 22, 2010

We're in Deep Kimchi Now....

After staring at each other for a few hours this morning with our thumbs up our bums, we blew this popsicle stand. We had that moment in the driveway, where we were trying to pick a direction...should we go to Target? To Zerns (the big farmer's market/flea market place)? To Cabellas for a kid-sized life jacket for Carl's planned canoe trip of hazardous doom?

We ended up picking Target.

But then, BUT THEN! We stopped at this International Food Market place, that we have been wanting to check out, and OHMYGOD. This place is totally full of international foodstuffs.

I'm talking giant bumpy melons of undetermined origin. Crazy spices that come in root-form, like ginger, but not ginger. Aisles and aisles of noodle packets and dried seaweed and strange little Asian donut dumplings filled with random stuff. LIVE EELS.

Craziness.

Carl did not realize til we left that he was wearing his dragon shirt with Chinese symbols all over it, and probably went tramping through the Asian food place with "American Asshole" stamped all over his shirt, for all he knew.

Anyway. Now we have a giant jar of kimchi in our fridge.


Kimchi is basically pickled cabbage, shallots, garlic, and spices. Sometimes, Carl will roll past some place in his old stomping grounds, and tell stories about his past kimchi conquests. "That used to be a Korean store. Kimchi." "This one time, I stopped at that Indian deli, and KIMCHI." "I had a Korean aunt when I was little. KimCHI."

He also tells a story about how kimchi is traditionally made by burying all of the ingredients in a clay urn and letting the whole thing ferment for months and months. So yeah. He'll have fermented garlic-cabbage breath for a month, but he'll sure be happy.

(KIMCHI!)

2 comments:

  1. Do you ever watch Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre Foods or Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations? One of them (or both) did a show about how Kimchi is made. I have never tried it...is it anything like sauerkraut? You were so right about Wickles. Maybe I need to try Kimchi, too.

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  2. I dont know...it's pretty weird. Kind of like sourkraut, but spicy. And really oniony and garlicky.

    I'll have to watch for that one-Carl would love it.

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