Spice up your life with Kimchi

There is nothing like topping a meal with a few fermented vegetables.

Great for the gut, yeah... but how about those taste buds!!!

I'm all for gut health but my motivation is taste.

When I google kimchi recipes I see all sorts of ingredients that I don't have nor that I want to keep. When I make the occasional kimchi, it is also with substitute ingredients that I am using for other recipes at the time. Sometimes I use miso for flavour and fermentation accelerator, this one I didn't though. It has fish sauce in it. I figured if the Koreans are using shrimp paste, I'll try fishy sauce!

The other thing I notice about online recipes as that they use quantities to make enough kimchi to feed an army.

We are 3 people, and only 2 of us eat kimchi. We love kimchi but not all the time. So I just make one jar - it lasts a week or two and then we're not looking for kimchi for a while.

At the time of making, we had already eaten the napa cabbage that I had purchased for the kimchi making session so I used red cabbage instead.

Ingredients

1/4 of a red cabbage

himalayan salt

Roughly chop the cabbage and in a big plastic bowl, sprinkle with salt, roll it over a few times, put a lid on it and put in the fridge for a few days. (alternatively, you can leave it on the bench for an hour or so and make on the same day).

1 grated carrot

2 fine chopped shallot

2 tsp minced ginger

1 tsp garlic

1/8 cup of fish sauce

1 tsp brown sugar

1 tsp hot chilli (more if you like it hot)

Mix the ingredients well and let sit for half hour or so, then pour into the cabbage bowl and squeeze and turn a few times until the cabbage is completely covered. (PS, you need super clean hands or gloves for this process).

Push the mixture into your glass jar and push down hard with a skewer. Squeeze out any space.

Slowly pour filtered water into the remaining gaps.

I left my kimchi out on the bench for a couple of days because we are in winter and our kitchen is pretty cool.

In a warmer climate, I would leave it out for a day and then refrigerate for a week.

Taste test it and decide if today is the day to enjoy your kimchi. If not quite there, try it again the next day.

Fermentation all depends on the conditions.

We have topped our asian rice meals, omelette, poached egg on toast, baked veg wrap and all sorts with our kimchi during the last week.

It's super versatile, super delicious and super good for you!