Kim Chi

Success!!!!

There WERE two quarts worth, but somehow by the time it made it into the jars, a pint had gone...erm....missing. In ma belleh.

I will never buy kim chi again, and neither should you. This 80 kinds of easy to make, only took about an hour of total work time (and that includes stuffing it into these jars) and is oh so good. I used this recipe to get the brine and process, but made all manner of modifications to the ingredient list, as follows:

- 1 head regular green cabbage (instead of napa ) roughly chopped into 1/2 inch-ish bits

- added yellow carrots, sorta-kinda julienned

- used an entire bunch of scallions, sliced

- instead of the asian hot peppers, I went with a blend of 1 Tbs hot, smoked paprika and 1 Tbs of regular paprika so that I could get that same hot/sweet combo but with a lower heat value. Consequently it has a definite kick, but is far milder than an average kim chi, which is exactly what I was after since I'm planning to feed it to my kid.

- added just a touch of soy sauce to the seasoning paste

The initial cabbage-only fermentation was overnight Saturday night, and then other veg & seasonings were mixed in Sunday and it sat until tonight - 6 days.

Perfection.

There was a fair bit of brine leftover & I couldn't bear to throw it out, so I poured some over a jar of cucumber spears and a small jar of whole garlic cloves. Those are now buried in the back of the fridge to keep me from eating them too early. With any luck, I'll forget they're there for a couple of weeks and come back to find nirvana.