Kimchi, Kimchi, it is good for you and me.

Here's a food post. It's kind of strange...We just spent a week in Kyoto, home of wonderfully fresh fish, tasty Unagi, not to sweet sweets, and some of the most interesting flavors in the world. But after about a week both Bethie and I had to admit, we missed Korean food. We've grown quite accustomed to bibimbap and galbitang and manduguk and, of course, kimchi.
My favorite is gimbap. It is like a sushi roll without the fish--carrots, a pickled root vegetable, a piece of crab meat (or sometimes, if you're lucky, Spam), sesame leaves, and sometimes canned tuna, wrapped in seaweed and cut into slices. It's usually eaten as a side dish or an appetizer and only costs $2.00 for an entire roll. I find myself eating gimbap everyday, sometimes twice a day. Yummy yummy goodness.


So this is kimchi. It is basically a vegetable that is semi-fermented with different spices. The most common kimchi is made from cabbage (as is the one on the right), but it is not unusual to see it made out of root veggies (like the one on the left). Some are a little spicy, some are a little sweet, some are fresh, some are not so fresh. It is usually served as a side dish/appetizer, and Koreans eat it with every single meal. As you can tell by the almost empty plates, we have developed quite a liking to it.
About a month ago, probably right around the time the temperature really dropped, Korea made it's Kimchi for the next few months. And I mean all of Korea. Bags and bags and, as you can see, literally truckloads of cabbage were mixed with spices and peppers, and placed in beautiful, ceramic kimchi pots throughout the country. Even my boss, Mr. Park, who swears that he never goes into the kitchen, spent a Sunday putting together kimchi with his family.
Here are some kimchi pots. Just about all Korean households have kimchi pots to let their unique kimchi ferment. You can find the pots in backyards, in pantries, in laundry rooms, on roofs, and just about anywhere else you can store a pot.
This dish is called galbitang. It is slow cooked pork ribs in a peppery soup. It is cooked at your table over a stove, and served communally. It is soooo yummy. We eat it at least once every couple of weeks. In fact, it was the very first Korean meal we ate here. It seemed like a strange breakfast when they brought it out to us after we just smiled and nodded at them, but we love it. You leave fat and happy for about $6 a person, including drinks and rice. Bethie says she's glad she started eating meat again. It would of been a shame to miss out on galbitang.