A Kimchi Sunday

October 27, 2008

Turnip and turnip leaf kimchi in a pool of sauce shaped like the silhouette of a kimchi-lover

Community/Communauté Choucroute is one of my proposals at the City Eco Lab in Saint-Étienne for the Design Biennial this November. Designing resilience into urban food systems is essential, and one way to achieve this is to store food en plein public. There’s precedence in the salted and/or pickled cabbage installations centered in traditional villages and along the roadside in parts of East Asia.

Kimchi array from l to r: daikon cubes, turnip greens, carrots and chard stems, chinese/napa cabbage, kimchi juice for extra rice lubrication

In preparation for the installation/demonstration of Communauté Choucroute, I’ve been experimenting with different fermented vegetable recipes. And when my landscape-architect friend Jacques decided that our shared passion for Korean pickled cabbage/kimchi as a way of spending a Sunday for us to get better acquainted, it was nothing short of prescient. Jacques prepared an exquisite workshop for us that included an instructional video from our online mentor Maangchi and all manner of traditional kimchi vegetables.

Classic chinese/napa cabbage kimchi

Although I’ve been making kimchi for decades, in my laziness I had resorted to using a pre-fab Korean kimchi paste from the Chinese supermarket. The flavours were good on their own, but not like the kimchi from a great Korean restaurant. Jacques introduced me to the ease of preparing the kimchi paste myself and an easier, faster recipe. Pardon my sounding like an advert when I gush that the results were astounding – perfect kimchi, 100% authentic flavour, in a fraction of the time. It’s like when you figure out how to roll your own pasta in 20 minutes, there’s no going back to storebought. Within a day our kimchi was bubbling away with a flavour so rounded with umami that I feel inspired to open up a kimchi boutique. The new secret ingredient? Chopped up raw oysters and all the sweet oyster juices. I am certain that it’s this enzyme-rich liquor that together with the lacto-bacilli-beasties transforms mere rotting vegetable matter into the champagne of cuisine vegetal.

Kimchi turnips like jewels on a plate.

• Maangchi’s instructional kimchi video

  Culiblog’s step by step kimchi on Flickr

  Monkfish papillot with beer and kimchi = delectable and works well with any ethically harvested, sturdy white fish

  Not cooking with kimchi – a raw food recipe of sorts starring kimchi, tofu, saffron onions, a perfect starter that even an omnivore would love!

  Valuable information and beautiful images from the Nation of Kimchi

  Sandor Ellix Katz’s essential guide to food fermentation, Wild Fermentation. In it you will read about all forms of food fermentation. I know of no book as comprehensive and READABLE as this one.

debra at 11:49 | Comments (8) | post to del.icio.us

A Light Year

October 6, 2008

In the past year, interesting projects that would yield so much content for Culiblog occupied me such that it was difficult to find time to write about them at all. Thankfully it’s the very first days into the New Year, a time for a resolution or two, one about more frequent and lighter blog postings, fueled by the memory of how energizing that used to be.

Here’s to a Light Year, easy to enjoy!
Shana Tova to you all.

• The nine day period between Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement) is called the Days of Awe, a time when we reflect, resolve and get ready for one big day of forgiveness and forgiving.

  Good luck with that, by the way.

  Here’s my favourite pomegranate-based recipe to lighten the load. It’s no coincidence that the Hindu holiday of Narvratri (the Nine Nights) and the Jewish Days of Awe fall at the same time as both cultures are enamoured with their adjusted lunar calendars.

  During Navratri devout Hindus eat a strictly vegetarian diet, and depending on where you source your information and authority, devout Jews are asked to do the same – to lead a sober life, for example by not wearing any leathuh.

  Here’s to a Light Year with plenty of joyous Cuisine Végètal.

debra at 14:33 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us

The Negev water blog

September 24, 2008

Graphic description of water discrepancy

Put your thumb and index finger together. That hole is the diameter of the incoming water line for an entire village of Bedouin families living in the Negev Desert in Israel. This water doesn’t come from the Israeli water grid, because this village, in official terms does not exist. In this village, like several hundreds of others, around 200 people are using a water line the size of the international hand signal for ‘everything is A-OK’.

Electrical lines in a Bedouin township criss-cross between the homes

Whilst visiting one such unrecognized village, our group, participants in the One Land project in Ayn Hawd, was generously hosted for lunch by a town elder. Because a part of my brain is permanently in the gutter, and I had just taken photographs of miniscule makeshift water infrastructure, I was surprised to find a Western style flush loo. My curiosity got the better of me and I later asked our host (an articulate engineer) about his loo. He said that here in the Negev, like everywhere else in the world, dry toilets although possibly better suited to a tenuous situation in which every single house here has a demolition order, dry toilets simply suffer from cultural taboos. Just like everywhere else.

Building housing the generator supplying electricity to the homes

Dang if that’s not a huge hole in the market, making dry toilets culturally desirable for everyone – and not just folks living in terrible conditions in unrecognized villages. So, who is tackling the cultural taboos associated with dry toilets and who has their heart set on making them aspirational? I’d like to introduce you to some people that I know.

debra at 17:48 | Comments (2) | post to del.icio.us