Thursday, August 8, 2013

That's SOME Cabbage! -Reprise

A couple of days ago I plucked our largest cabbage to date, which ended up weighing 5 pounds. Raj and I tested it to make sure it hadn't sacrificed taste for size and gotten bitter about life.  But no, our Giant Cabbage was still sweet and crunchy and densely marbled.  It took me a couple days but I did finally process it: we now have 2.5 pounds of Red Cabbage Salad in the 'fridge and 2.5 pounds of Red Cabbage Kim Chi fermenting merrily on the kitchen counter.


I've never made Kim Chi before, and since it is traditionally made with Napa Cabbage and fish sauce, I knew I would be making some key adjustments to the recipe.  For one thing, I have the wrong color cabbage and for the other, not having fish sauce on hand (and being loath to brew a batch up in a barrel buried in our back field), I was going to have to improvise.  I think I'll wait to post my adapted recipe until I see how it turns out; it will be 2 or 3 days before I can taste it. In the meantime, here is the recipe from Epicurious.com I used as a starting point: Traditional Napa Cabbage Kimchi. Please note that I left out the radishes in my version as well.
My Kim Chi will not look like this.