A little more about me.
I am a girl born and raised in a peaceful little village located on the outer borders of Metro Manila. My family was lucky enough to get a property in such a quiet and kind of secluded village where I could enjoy the conveniences of being in the city and the quiet and solace of the rural areas.
As far back as I can remember, I have had this love f or cooking. I started cooking when I was I think 9 or 10 years old. The first dish I ever learned cooking is steamed rice and fried egg. I then evolved to pasta, casseroles, dumplings and the occasional baked goods.
Now, where on earth does kimchi fall in to place?
I think at this point, you probably have deduced that I am not Korean. Nope, I'm far from that. I am proudly a tanned, petite and full-blooded Filipina. Lookie my picture
So, yes, I am Filipina.Kimchi is a traditional Korean dish made of veggies and spices. It's traditionally aged in vats or jars and buried underground during winter. Not that you can't make Kimchi during any other season. To simplify, Kimchi is basically a type of pickle eaten as a side dish to every meal of the day. They eat it in a variety of ways: ala carte, in stews, fried rice, pizza and who knows what else.
Just a quick background on pickles:
"Pickling", also known as "brining"or "corning", is the process of preserving food by anaerobic fermentation in brine to produce lactic acid, or marinatingand storing it in an acid solution, usually vinegar (acetic acid). The resulting food is called a pickle. This procedure gives the food a salty or sour taste.In South Asia, edible oils are used as the pickling medium with vinegar.[1]
Now eating pickles as a side dish is not limited to Koreans. The Japanese have their tsukemono, Filipinos have achara, the Chinese have a lot of pickle types to even mention, even the western world has its own brand of pickles.
But this story is about Kimchi.
So there I was, getting over a few rough roads in my life and took to watching Korean soap operas. The one I was watching in particular was Coffee Prince about a poor girl who resorted to dressing like a man to get a job in a coffee shop. It's a romantic comedy and really helps soothe a few tangled nerves. Now off the central story line, a lot of Korean dishes were featured all throughout the series. One of which was the Kimchi fried rice. Prior to this, I had already been acquainted to Kimchi several years back by my dad. But I never really thought of putting it in fried rice.
I suddenly had this really bad hankering for Kimchi fried rice, but Kimchi is so expensive off the rack. With nothing else to do, and a need to take my mind of things, I went into research on how Kimchi is made. I came across this nice Korean lady online who demos Korean dishes. You can find her site here.
Substituting a few ingredients to things readily available in the market, I ventured into making my very first batch of kimchi which I shared with an officemate. He then told me that he used to order kimchi from a different town regularly. So I said that whenever I make a batch, I'll sell him some. And the rest is history.
That's the history behind how I became the local Kimchi Girl.
I'll be posting my recipes and other gastronomical (<<is this even the right term???) adventures. Let this blog be the testament to my rekindled romance with cooking and the kitchen.
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| Fresh Kimchi for fermentation (after about 4 hours of working on it >_<) |
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