08.13.2009 Cooking with Carmen

Today I stayed home. The plan was to go to Shibuya after lunch and stay home to make dinner tomorrow for everyone, (It's a way for me to say thank you, I guess) but some people aren't going to be home tomorrow so I switched up my plans. Not only that, but the lady at the front desk called the Masanari Art Museum for me today to see if I could go visit. (It's not open to public and requires a two weeks advance booking, plus references?) And they said OK! So I'm gonna go tomorrow. =D

Although I stayed home today, I had a lot of fun. And, I learned how to make kimchi!! (and you will too hehe)

For dinner I "made" pizza, spaghetti, and mixed vegetable soup. ("lor sung tong"). I say made in quotations because RuZhao helped me a lot and although we went grocery shopping together, the soup was mainly her work and my chopping and everything else was very much under her watch.

1. pizza before being burnt 2. pizza going in 3. "red indian"

The pizza was made on top on wonton skins! It tasted pretty good except only a few made it without being burnt from the oven. My friend turned the oven on high so that it would cook faster and then we forgot to check it. By the time we did most of it was burnt. Anyway the pizza consisted of wonton skin, ketchup, veggie ham, pineapple, black pepper, cheese, and red and yellow peppers.

left, tomatoes being squashed for flavour in soup and right, pasta sauce.

All in all, my dinner was a bit of a fail because most of the food was bland tasting if not burnt. I mentioned the probability of the food being "dan" (simple?) before putting it outside and she tasted it and said it was OK. I only find out later that it was probably because she likes her food "dan", unlike most people!

OK! Kimchi time!!

This was fun, and definately not bland. It is so spicy!! I had to have a cup of water on standby each time I had to taste-test.

1. First, you need to take your lettuce rip it in half (by cutting a slit at the base) and put coarse salt between the layers and then squash it under something heavy so water will come out. (This will take a few hours. We did it at 4:30pm and returned at 7:30pm)

2. Prepare your vegetables!

The temple ran out of apples, so we had to use a pear instead. Just remmeber apple > pear. We grinded the pear, and a bit of ginger. Chopped a radish and a carrot into thin slices.

3. Mix everything together

The reason why the rice powder failed the first time is because we left it on the stove for too long and we did not watch and stir.

4. Lettuce

Basically fill each layer of lettuce with the vegetables

5. Ferment!

To get an even more sour fementy taste, you should leave it in a fridge for three days before eating it. Since we want to eat it tomorrow, we just left it on the kitchen table overnight.

That's it! I also learned how to make the Japanese vinegary lettuce too because we had leftover lettuce and no more kimchi. But it's not as exciting as kimchi and I need to rest for tomorrow. I'm going to try to make some when I get home. I need faithful taste testers though...