Kimchi, October 29
Our October event was an action-packed night filled with community, food and kimchi!
We kicked things off with a Community Dialogue facilitated by Andrew and Blanca from the Mount Pleasant Food Network (based out of the neighbourhood house). As a relatively new food network, they were interested in receiving community input about what neighbourhood food resources and knowledge should be shared, as well as what people think makes a healthy food community. At the Dialogue we discussed all of these questions, as well as got participants to locate food assets on a big map of Mount Pleasant. It was a great start to a much larger conversation within the community! For more information about MPFN, click here.
Talking about food security made everyone very hungry, so it was the perfect time to share our potluck. No surprises here, the food was amazing! (Psst...the recipe for Sachiko's delectable rice cakes is here.) Another one of the dishes was our workshop leader's finished kimchi with rice, which was the perfect way to prepare people's tastebuds for the workshop.
It was obvious that our fearless kimchi leaders Yunjoo and Jennifer had done SO much prep for this workshop as they presented all the ingredients very neatly in a cooking show format. In the demo we got to see all the separate ingredients as well as the different stages of the kimchi paste, which gives the finished product its intense red color.
If you don't know us by now, we are big fans of hands-on learning and taking goodies home, so we asked people to roll up their sleeves, put some gloves on and get to kimchi stuffing! Everyone swarmed the table and eagerly set out to mix the cabbage in the paste, bundle it up and cram it into jars. We learned with traditional kimchi you leave the cabbage in big half or quarter sizes instead of shredding it, so we quickly realized that 1L jars would have been more ideal. However, we were in a room problem solvers, and people either cut them up or jammed the cabbage in really hard.
Do you like the color red? Good, because if you don't protect yourself, you might get stuck with this reddish hue all over your skin. Gloves are a good idea!
Thank you so much to Yunjoo and Jennifer for showing us how to make traditional kimchi!
If you missed the workshop, try our recipe here, where you can also find an easy printable version. Also, check out photos from the workshop to see what some of the Korean speciality ingredients look like.
Jal Mug Get Sam Ni Da! [Korean for Bon Appetit!]
