Adventures in Cooking: Kimchi

Living in D'Kar, many of the food items I like to eat in Canada are not available. This is unfortunate, because food is one of the great pleasures of my life... But it's also an opportunity to try and make some of those food items from scratch. One of my proudest triumphs, for example, has been tahini - closely followed by hummous and babaganoush.

Most recently, I decided to tackle something I definitely won't be finding in Botswana anytime soon: the Korean staple, kimchi. Kimchi is basically spicy pickled cabbage (with various additions, if you please), and is eaten constantly by Koreans. Admittedly, I don't eat a huge amount of it at home, but I do enjoy it. I've been growing Chinese cabbages in the garden, since I vastly prefer them to normal cabbages, and the first ones are reaching maturity - what better use for them than kimchi?

So, without further ado, Adventures in Cooking: Kimchi, a Photo Story.

The cabbage. It doesn't look quite as compact as the Chinese cabbage you'd buy in a grocery store - I'm not sure why that is, perhaps they tie up the leaves when they're grown commercially? Or it could just be that this is a variant - or the soil/sun/water wasn't the same - who knows, really. The point is, it tastes like a Chinese cabbage.

Cabbage with my foot, to show you how big it is!

Harvested, and sitting on my kitchen counter.

Cabbage root and stem, after I took all of the leaves off. The stem was amazingly woody, especially near the root... Possibly I should have harvested earlier.

First step of kimchi: Salt the cabbage thoroughly, and leave it for several hours (or days, depending on whose recipe you're following...) so that some of the water leaves the cabbage leaves and they pickle.

Next: wring out the cabbage, cut it (if you wish), and prepare the kimchi sauce/marinade (mostly ginger, garlic, and chili)

Ready to mix!

All mixed up. Doesn't it look delicious?

In jars, ready to ferment. This is where I ran into some trouble - you're supposed to seal it up in the jars and then leave it at room temperature for a few days, until you see it bubbling - that means that the fermentation has started, and you can then put it in the fridge. The problem was that we've had a resurgence of winter, and the days following the kimchi-making were basically like being in a refrigerator, so I don't think that the fermentation could get started. Bother!

However, today I decided to open up one jar and just see what was going on, and make sure it wasn't going bad from being left out so long. Here are the results - it hasn't fermented, but it's still quite good. Not as good as the kimchi I get at home, but it's still decent. Definitely better than no kimchi at all! The weather has warmed up a bit, so I'm going to keep the other jar out and see if it will ferment.

meat

I seem to be making a lot of posts about meat. This is from the Kuru Dance Festival. It was cooked in giant cauldrons over the fire for hours, stirred with tree branches, emerging in battered, fat-bubbly, tough-and-stringy chunks to feed the masses that assembled in West Hanahai for the festival. It was a bit reminiscent of my first weekend in Botswana: Indepdence Day long weekend, which is coming up in just over a month. I've been here almost a year.

More on the dance festival later, hopefully, but I've been quite slack about covering "important events" - dedicated readers, if they exist, may have indignantly observed my lack of follow-up on the Okavango trip. I will try to return to it!

Taxonomy

Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World
(author: Carol Kaesuk Yoon)

It's a bit of a clunky title, but a very interesting article about the underestimated importance of what scientists would call taxonomy, but what any person might call "naming the world." Recognizing, organizing, and naming all of the diverse living things we encounter appears to be a human universal with many common features across all cultures. It's something that I've touched on before in my blogs about human evolution - the vital importance of learning to name and identify the myriad plants and animals around us, the knowledge that can spell life or death for a hunter-gatherer. Perhaps the survival imperative to learn plants and animals is gone for most of us, but it's still a built-in drive, and something that can enrich our life enormously - in fact, I would say it is necessary to truly inhabit our natural world.

"No wonder so few of us can really see what is out there. Even when scads of insistent wildlife appear with a flourish right in front of us, and there is such life always — hawks migrating over the parking lot, great colorful moths banging up against the window at night — we barely seem to notice."

Most people - myself included, though I'm trying to remedy it - walk past the same plants and animals every day and never really see them. The same trees, bushes, flowers, birds, insects, small mammals.... Our eyes graze over them every single day, and yet they slide past like a meaningless artificial backdrop to the supposedly grand drama of our human concerns. The vast network of living organisms means nothing. We don't have to interact with it; we don't depend on it for survival (or so we believe). Thousands of times, someone may walk past cedars, madrona, poplars, firs, and never notice them or think to identify or categorize them. You could take that person somewhere else, stand them in front of one of those trees, and say, "does this grow in your neighborhood?" They wouldn't be able to answer. They'd make a guess - hem and haw - "it looks a bit familiar, maybe" - but nothing approaching certainty. This incredible, living and breathing world that we inhabit is passing us by without notice.

I don't want to quote the whole article, but the author makes a suggestion at the end, and I have to back it up: "Just find an organism, any organism, small, large, gaudy, subtle — anywhere, and they are everywhere — and get a sense of it, its shape, color, size, feel, smell, sound. [...] meditate, luxuriate in its beetle-ness, its daffodility. Then find a name for it. [...] To do so is to change everything, including yourself. Because once you start noticing organisms, once you have a name for particular beasts, birds and flowers, you can’t help seeing life and the order in it, just where it has always been, all around you."

Once you've pinned down one organism - anything - and scrutinized it, thought for a moment about the colour of its leaves or wings, its size and shape, its roots or feet or claws, and then given it a name... You'll start to see it everywhere, with a burst of familiarity and recognition when you spot it again, as though it were a secret friend in the chaos of the world. To see a small brown bird and know what it is, to call it by name when you see it perched on the edge of a garbage can or swaying on a windblown tree branch, is to make a part of the world your own.

bonescape

These are a bit old, but I felt like posting something.
Elephant bones, from the Okavango.

from beating heart to supper pot

Last week, N and I went to the community trust to go over their new contract with the African Development Foundation. (Yes, we got funding, it's very exciting, I may write about it later.) In typical form, we arrived to the settlements late, rounded up the board members, drove in the dark to the second settlement, scrounged for firewood, and with great anticipation seasoned the meat we'd bought earlier at Ghanzi Butchery. "I'll get the braai stand," N announced, and hopped into the back of the truck to look for it. A few moments later, after much shuffling and crashing around, he emerged in consternation, without the braai stand. "NO! Those motherf***ers didn't pack it!" he howled. We stood for a moment, staring at the fire, which the cold wind was quickly fanning into braai-worthy coals - at the indigo 9:30 p.m. sky with the Milky Way strewn brightly upon it - at our own complaining bellies.

"Well," I said, "we could use the top of the gas burner..." So we unscrewed the top of the gas cannister, wedged it between a couple of bricks, and haphazardly piled the meat on top of it. The burner is poorly shaped for braaing; it has some metal flaps that point straight up, holes in unusual places, and overall does not make for evenly cooked meat. However, being desperate, we made the best of it, and enjoyed our dinner.

We all slept on the floor of the VDC (Village Development Committee) office, as it was too cold and late to set up tents, and woke up the next morning to collect the rest of the board members and hold our meeting. The purpose of this whole last-minute trip was to go over, in excruciating details, several dozen pages of convulted American legal language... The process took hours, involving the following steps:
1. I read the passage in English
2. After thinking for awhile, I translated the passage into simplified/logical English, as opposed to legalese
3. Nathaniel translated the simplified English into Setswana
4. Questions and clarifications
We finished around three, and went in search of our belated lunch. The kgosi of Grootlaagte had just slaughtered one of her cows, so we drove a few kilometers off into the bush to her cattle post, and found the cow in the process of being loaded onto someone's pickup truck.

It was quite a scene. I'd never actually seen a freshly-killed cow... sides of meat hanging in butcheries or markets, perhaps, but never the whole shebang. Even this time, the animal had already been skinned, but it was still the most visceral (no pun intended!) experience I've had of a dead cow.

We parked just outside their fence and walked in. The first thing I saw was the colour, a huge splash of the brightest red imaginable. It was initially removed from shape, dimension, perspective - just a blot of scarlet, surrounded by the weaving shapes of hungry dogs. As we got closer I realized it was the inside of the skin, laid across some low bushes, with some of the meat still lying on top of it and the organs spread out in one corner. The blood on the light interior of the hide was surprisingly bright, much brighter than the duller crimson of the muscle tissues. Seeing the organs laid out was another book-learning vs. practical-learning moment; though I know all the names, structures, and functions of the organs from my biology class, when they were messily, bloodily jumbled about on the ground I couldn't tell which was which. N knew exactly what they were from having seen countless cows laid out in just such a manner. There was one large, rounded sac that I didn't recognize; I asked N, but he couldn't remember its name in English. "It's, it's..." he struggled, "it's, you know, it had many flaps, and the grass is in it..." One of the women chopping up the carcass neatly sliced open the organ in question, and I realized that it was the rumen.* Indeed - many flaps, and full of grass.

There were three or four women slicing, separating, sorting, and cleaning the organs - with blood splattered on their dresses and dyeing their arms red to the elbow, they neatly wielded their long-bladed knives and quickly sliced the connective tissues, separating intestine from stomach, lungs from heart. One made a long slit in the stomach and they began shovelling great handfuls of half-digested grass out of it - huge amounts, the entirety so heavy that they couldn't just pick up the stomach and empty its contents out onto the ground. When it was empty, they turned the stomach inside out and washed it in a bucket, revealing the frilly convoluted texture of something I like to think of as "delicious tripe" and not "recently in contact with half-digested grass." Three men struggled to lift one of the back legs, and staggered over to the pickup truck to dump it in. The receiving men in the back actually overbalanced and fell down with the weight of the leg, landing and staining their trousers in a puddle of blood.

Quickly, the organs had been sorted (saleable; non-saleable), and all the meat loaded into the back, and we followed the pickup into the village to their own little BMC (Botswana Meat Commission). By slicing a hole between bone and tendon, and hooking a piece of wire through the hole, they hung the huge haunches of meat up on a tree, then laid the hide out on the ground beneath a spring scale, and waited for their customers. Soon there were several dozen people gathered around, pointing at which bit they'd like, and with axes and knives the cow was slowly chopped apart on the carpet of its hide, weighed on the spring scale, paid for, and then stuffed into a plastic bag and taken home for supper. By the time we left, half of it must have been gone...

The whole thing took perhaps three hours, to kill the cow, clean and divide it, transport it and hang it in the impromptu butchery, and then sell it off piece by piece. In the Western removal from our food, we don't like to think about where our meat comes from; these mystic degrees of separation exist for us from a cow in a field (or in a disease-infested metal cage in a sunless warehouse, whichever), and the tidily packaged slice of meat that we buy in the supermarket. There are a few more links in the North American meat chain, but this is essentially it: the animal is killed. Immediately its blood is drawn, its stomach emptied of the food it was eating just an hour ago, its organs separated and sorted, its meat sliced into reasonable portions and then swiftly sold off. Death is not a long process for a meat animal; there is no polite grace period, no period of transition from "cow" to "beef." It happens literally with the stroke of a knife. One moment living, the next moment meat.

We had part of that cow for lunch. I wanted to savour it, to pay some kind of respect to the animal that provided me with my first real-live look at a rumen. But we cooked it in the traditional style of boiling it to death with an excess of oil, and in fact I didn't enjoy it at all.


* Ok, revision, after writing this I realized I really didn't know a cow's digestive system very well, and looked it up... I think that what I was looking at was actually the omasum, whose job it is to suck up the nutrients and water from the somewhat-digested grass. The cow's "stomach" has four sections: rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum. The biggest compartment and what you'd probably think of as the stomach is actually the rumen, but the abomasum is the bit that's closest to the human stomach.