Smells Bad, Tastes Good

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When I sat down to write this post about smelly foods, my mind immediately went to durian.  I've never eaten it.  Durian, if you're not aware, is a fruit that grows in Malaysia and other parts of Southeast Asia.  It is said to have a delicious almond-custard taste, but a strong aroma that has caused the fruit to be banned in many places.  I'd like to try it someday.

Nope, we didn't have durian for lunch today, but we did eat some foods that are quite "aromatic," you might say.  First, we opened the seal on a jar of kimchi that we had made back in February when we harvested cabbage and carrots.  Kimchi is a Korean sauerkraut that is fermented and stored to age.

When finally opened, it has a slight fizz.  It's cold, tangy, flavorful.  It's very healthy and is supposed to be eaten before a meal to get your digestive enzymes working.  We enjoy it and have several more jars aging in the fridge to open and enjoy this summer.  Kimchi is probably not a dish I would have eaten as a kid.  It's funny how your taste buds change as you get older and more adventurous in your menus!

Now that our digestive enzymes are kicked into gear, it's time for the main course of our smelly culinary dishes of the day.  We normally eat primarily things that we grow in the garden or raise on the pasture, but not today.  We're on a mission.  We're rotating through our pantry of emergency foods we store in case of hurricanes, power outages from EMPs, pandemics, terrorist attacks or alien invasions.  We go through our oldest provisions and then restock the food pantry with items with longer expiration dates.

Today we'll pull out two tins of sardines.  They are approaching their 'use by' dates. Tricia opted for Mediterranean style sardines that are marinated in olive oil, black olives and spices.  For my choice, even though they are produced in Poland, I selected a tin of sardines in Louisiana hot sauce.  I never knew the Polish had an affinity for Louisiana hot sauce.  Who knew?

With a couple of slices of homemade and toasted sour dough bread, I made an open-faced sardine sandwich, pouring every drop of the Louisiana hot sauce marinade to be soaked up by the bread.  Very elegant.  Produced to be enjoyed by the discriminating palate.

The sardine steaks lay atop the bread and the pungent aroma of faraway seas and exotic fish markets filled the air.  I'm not sure if this meal would earn any Michelin stars, but it's downright delicious!  It was a lunch fit for a king and queen.  The last morsels of bread were used to sop up the savory fishy juices.  We topped off our coffee cups and enjoyed the afternoon.  Yes, we'll need breath mints after this meal.  (We're kind of weird, I know!)

Preserving an Excess of Cabbage and Carrots

We have an overabundance of cabbage and carrots in the outdoor fridge due to bumper crops from the garden.  We've been cooking Cabbage and Sausage jambalaya, Egg rolls, steamed cabbage, roasted cabbage, coleslaw, Cream of Carrot soup, raw carrots, roasted carrots and on and on.  There's still a lot left, but we have a plan.

We've got a couple of recipes for lacto-fermenting cabbage and carrots that we always do, so we got busy.  First we are going to make a Korean sauerkraut (Kimchi).  It involves shredding cabbage, carrots, radishes, garlic, green onions and grated jalapenos.  We doubled the recipe to make four quarts.

We like to use a big wooden masher tool to bruise the cabbage and carrots and get the juices flowing.  You would think that an enormous stainless steel bowl would keep the contents inside, but we made quite a mess in the kitchen with bits of vegetables flying all over the place.

We tightly pack the kimchi into wide mouth quart-sized Mason jars.  The juices from the crushed cabbage and carrots coat the kimchi.  We also add salt.

Finally, we add 2 tablespoons of whey to each jar.  The whey is a by-product of making yogurt or cheese, and it is a preservative.  

Kimchi is put together.  Now we'll do Ginger Carrots.  We began to shred carrots and a bunch of ginger.

We've got loads of carrots to shred.  Our food processor got a work-out today.

All the carrots and ginger was dumped in the big bowl, and I once again got busy with the potato masher, working and working to crush the carrots and release the flavorful juices.

We spooned the gingered carrots in 2 quart sized Mason jars and added 2 tablespoons of whey in each jar.  For both the kimchi and the gingered carrots, it's real important that your vegetables stay beneath the liquid.  We purchased some glass weights that work perfectly for keeping the kimchi and the carrots below the level of the liquid.

We'll leave these on the kitchen counter at room temperature for about 3 days and then we'll transfer to the fridge.  It'll keep there for months and months and, believe it or not, gets better with age.

Very tangy, fizzy, and flavorful.  Very healthy for you, too!  We still have more cabbage and carrots.  I told Tricia that she should make a carrot cake!

In the Back of the Refrigerator

Before I get to today's topic, I wanted to show you one thing that my wife reminded me about the honey harvest.  Obviously we got honey and lots of it.  We also got beeswax and honey water.  The one thing I neglected to tell you that we also got was fire starters.  When we strained the impurities out of the beeswax, it left us with muslin rags filled with a waxy-debris substance.  These make great fire starters for a campfire or fireplace and we've put them into a zip loc bag to save for cooler weather and fire building.

Back in April when the weather was nice and cool, we posted THIS POST that explained one thing that we were going to do with the last of our cabbage crop.  We made kimchi or Korean sauerkraut.  If you click on the link highlighted in blue in the first sentence of this paragraph, it will take you back to that post and show you just how we did it, using lacto-fermentation as a food preservation method of choice.

We pushed the two quarts to the very back of the refrigerator.  The best thing to do is just forget it's there.  Then, on a hot, summer day, you reach back there and pull out a jar of kimchi that's been aging for months.

I guess ordinary folks would throw this out.  It looks kind of sketchy.  When you open the cap and sniff it, it smells very strong.

When you take a fork and dig into it, magic happens.  It's packed in there tight.  You have to work at it to get it unpacked and out of the jar and onto your plate.

Now for the taste test.  It's cool and tangy, effervescent and tart. It's also spicy.  In short, it's delicious and perfect for taking a few bites before your meal to get your digestion into gear.  We've been eating some for lunch each day and I suppose we'll be opening the second jar that's hiding in the back of the fridge.

What To Do With All This Cabbage?

We had a bumper crop of cabbage this year, and we need to do something with it quickly.  We've had cole slaw, egg rolls, cabbage and sausage jambalaya, and sautéed cabbage.  This morning, we decided to make Kimchi.  We used the recipe from Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon of the Weston A. Price Foundation.  We gathered the ingredients:

The recipe we used is shown below.  I think if you click on the photo, it will enlarge.

We shredded up the cabbage, chopped the green onions, grated the carrots, the radishes, the ginger, and the garlic.  Then we added the pepper flakes, sea salt and whey to the big bowl.  Tricia had whey left over from when she made mozzarella cheese the other day.

Then, with a wooden masher tool, we took turns banging and pounding on the contents of the bowl.  What we're attempting is to crush everything and release all the juices,  After Tricia had enough, she gave me the pounder and I worked on it for a good while.

We used a canning funnel and spooned the contents into each jar, packing it all tight while pressing down.  The juices should cover the vegetable mixture completely.  We have some glass weights the sit on top, pushing it down and keeping the liquid covering everything.

Here's an up-close look at the kimchi.  It has a nice color and aroma to it.

We put lids on top, dating the kimchi and set on the counter.  We'll leave it there for three days at room temperature.  They we'll put it in the fridge and let it ferment and age.

After a few months, we'll pull it out of the fridge and give it a try.  We do a lot of lacto-fermenting.  In fact we've been eating on lacto-fermtented banana peppers that we did last year and have 2 1/2 quarts left. They are still holding up well and taste great, like hopefully the kimchi will turn out.

Sunday Night Rambling

Perhaps tomorrow night we'll talk about the world situation and how it relates to FOOD.  What can you do to prepare at this late time?  Tonight, I don't want to talk about serious things.  I'd rather just relax and show you some photos and discuss things lighter in nature.

What you are seeing on the stoneware baking sheet below are sweet potatoes.  These are an heirloom variety that comes up every year in the garden.  They are called Golden Wonder and come from Tennessee.  A guy called "the barefoot gardener" (Jeff Poppin) mailed them to me, we planted them, and the grow every year alongside the existing Beauregard variety.

Each year we dig up over a hundred pounds!  We harvested back in October and still have some left.  We always eat the biggest first.  What we're left with now are the smaller ones.  We like to cut them in half, brush them with melted butter and bake them.  They are so sweet and delicious!  I expect to see the slips (sprouts) coming up in the garden for this year's crop any day now.  Usually by the time the existing crop is gone, the new crop is on its way.

I picked the last of the carrots from the fall crop this weekend.  I had picked all the Danvers variety (orange) last week.  On Saturday, I pulled the last of the remaining Cosmic Purple Carrots and Atomic Red Carrots.  Sounds kind of psychedelic, doesn't it?  They are pretty.  They taste like a normal carrot, though. 

The Cosmic Purple carrots are purple on the outside, but the interior is orange.  The Atomic Red carrots, however, are red through and through.  

As we switch the seasons from fall to spring, we had some work to do on preserving the crops.  We had a few heads of cabbage left and it gave us an idea.  We'd make Kimchi.  We hadn't done that in a while.  Kimchi is a Korean side dish made from cabbage, carrots, ginger, green onions, radishes, and garlic.  All of those items are shredded and mixed up.  Then salt is added and whey.  The mixture is pounded to release the juices and then packed tightly into quart jars.  It is set out on the counter for three days at room temperature.  It ferments and then is put into the refrigerator for long storage.  The longer you keep it, the better it tastes.  Here it is on the third day of fermentation before putting it in the fridge.

It has a tangy flavor and is a good, cool, side dish.  The fermented radishes we showed you In This Post are done now.  We've been eating them in salads and just as a tasty snack.  Tomorrow we'll tackle weightier subjects.

Making Kimchi with Bok Choy

We've produced lots of bok choy this fall and have really enjoyed its crunchiness, flavor, and health benefits.  We have a full row of it and it was planted close together and not spaced.  It is a resilient crop and fast growing.  Out of everything planted in the Fall Garden, it's the first thing that's ready for harvesting.  It was planted last year for the first time and has become a mainstay in our Fall Garden.

The row of bok choy

A few warm days has induced the bok choy to bolt.  Bolting is when the crop sends up a shoot that contains a flower.  In effect, the plant is trying to produce seed to ensure that there will be more bok choy next year and the year after.  We have discovered that bok choy is more tender and tasty before it bolts.

The flower of the bok choy

So that means we'd better either start eating even more of it, give it away, or preserve it.  I picked four or five plants and decided we'd try something new.  We always make sauerkraut, but we've never made the Korean equivalent - kimchi. Kimchi is a traditional Korean side dish made with fermented vegetables.  In this case, we'll use bok choy, instead of cabbage to make it.  Bok Choy is, after all, called Chinese cabbage or Chinese greens by some.

Bok Choy Harvest

We got the recipe from Nourishing Traditions, a cookbook put out by the Weston A. Price Foundation and written by Sally Fallon.  While I was out in the garden, in addition to the bok choy, I selected some fresh carrots and radishes to add to the mix.  Yum!

Fresh radishes and carrots

The other ingredients besides bok choy (continuing clockwise in the photo below) was fresh green onions from the garden, ginger, carrots, Criolla Sella pepper flakes, radishes, sea salt, whey, and garlic.

The Ingredients

I popped all the bok choy into the food processor and chopped them up real good. The greens transformed into a deep green chopped salad that was heavy with liquid.

Chopped Bok Choy

After removing the chopped up bok choy, I shredded all the other vegetables in the food processor, making a slaw-like amalgamation of veggies.

A multitude of shredded vegetables

I added four tablespoons of whey and one tablespoon sea salt that will act as the preservative.  Whey is a by-product of making cheese or yogurt and we save it in jars in the fridge for lacto-fermenting vegetables.

Adding the whey

After mixing it all up thoroughly, I took a wooden mallet (meat tenderizer) and began scrunching (is that a word?) the mixture all together, bruising it and releasing all of the juices contained int the vegetables.

It's Hammer Time!

I then spooned the kimchi into two wide mouth jars, leaving an inch head space at the top of the jar and then sealed them tightly.  We'll leave these at room temperature for 3 days.  It looks a little scary, know, but we're going to give it a chance...

Letting the kimchi sit for 3 days at room temperature

At the end of 3 days, we'll move the jars to the refrigerator to slow down the fermentation process.  I noticed last night the lids were bulging a little, letting me know that the fermentation process is well underway.

So I don't forget...

Once you move the kimchi to the fridge, you can begin eating it, but I'm told that it gets better with age.  A friend of mine who is of Korean descent told me one time that kimchi is delicious, BUT that it packs a powerful smell.  In fact, his wife wouldn't let him eat it in the house.  He had to open the jar and eat it outside.  This is going to be an interesting experiment.  (We might open the jar outside!!)