20090213
.small.cabbage.worlds.
Health magazine considers kimchi to be one of the healthiest foods you can shovel down your gullet. For those of you not in the know, it is a red mess of fermented cabbage and carrots, "loaded with vitamins A, B, and C, but its biggest benefit may be in its 'healthy bacteria' called lactobacilli, found in fermented foods like kimchi and yogurt."
I have some vague memories of either trying it, or simply being around it as a child. If anything, Asian families seem to love all manners of foods, pickled and preserved into eternity. The smells of these exploits, especially those involving the infamous fish sauces of that noxious dragon of the Orient, are legendary, and I should qualify that even if I didn't directly consume fermented potions, I surely experienced them all the same.
My real memory of kimchi in recent memory was when I lived about ten blocks and three years down the street, in a small brick apartment complex, half sunken into the grass, but threatening anyway to topple over into the parking lot and roll down into the Olentangy River. With a messy grin, the dumpster in the lot loomed greedily over a sad plot of what appeared to be a failed pepper garden.
My roommate at the time was half Korean. His mother, allegedly, was a descendent of the Korean royal family: a numbered child of a numbered wife. I was told how her brother and her used to go up into the mountains early in the morning and practice traditional tae kwon do and tang soo do. That is to say the mystical sort of legends, taught by white-browed masters grunting approvingly as dishevelled students punch trees and thrust their fists into sacks of grain.
As far as I could piece together, Paul's father, scarred by chemical fires and dirty blood left the Korean War with a new bride in bag, a silent wife ready to take leave from her homeland, and like Orpheus, resisting the temptation to look backwards. Only there was no lover hot on her heels - indeed, she was the Eurydice as soon as this story crosses the ocean - but only the body of her brother, with an arrow in his chest, like the last coloured belt to prove his martial arts achievements.
Dirty blood ran in the family, however, and Paul was told his kidneys were failing while he was in high school. He was expected to maybe have a year left. He chose to keep it to himself. Maybe he wanted to spare his teenage friends the distress of worrying about somebody else's problems, greater than their own. Maybe he had come to terms with it. And after all else is said, after all logic has coursed through one's veins like the flu, there is maybe that fear of mortality.
It was enough to turn anyone into a God-fearing Christian.
And so he somehow made it into college, sitting next to me in my first university math course, wherein I discovered what my future didn't hold in store for me, and I devised ways to derail myself from the tracks my father had waved me off on. I don't remember the first words we really said to each other, but desperate for friends after having been displaced for the n-th time in my life, I was ready to concede to the first awkward engineering student talking about something other than the major. We spent our freshman year playing video games and cooking pasta in his rice cooker, the only legal heating element in the dorm rooms.
So when we moved in together, I don't suspect it had much to do with anything other than our relative isolations in the sea of alien undergraduate students. It was convenience. It was a year in which I discovered other friends, found a bike to get myself around, and struggled to push myself out of the womb of my freshman year into the hands of Columbus's closed-door parties and shows. Paul was an umbilical cord to my freshman year, the last real connection I had to those days, and rather than riding out on my ankles like Jacob and Esau, I saw him turn more recluse over the next year, becoming more involved with World of Warcraft and talking about transferring schools, or dropping out altogether. His eating habits deteriorated from a daily stint at the Rally's down the street to leaving giant bagfuls of chicken wings in the freezer for months at a time, and barbecue sauce in the pantry that I eventually used in semi-secrecy.
In any case, one of the times that his mother came down to visit us, I found out at the last moment, not only about his mother coming down at all, but also that it was Paul's birthday. It put the visit in context, but I was surprised to not have known about it beforehand.
She took us out to a sushi restaurant in the Short North, happy that I was Paul's friend and roommate in Columbus, and was more than happy to pay for everyone. In fact, she made sure to push her beer over to my side of the table when the waiter was gone, urging me to drink like a white-browed gong fu master, or just a mother hosting a three person birthday dinner party. I picked through the food, unsure of what was vegan and what wasn't, and tried my best to look full and content.
When we returned to the apartment, she was in good spirits and revealed a bottle of sake the size of my shin, declaring that the party was just getting started. Paul never drank, and shrugged off the invitation, leaving me to go shot for shot with his mother, who was becoming increasingly belligerent. Paul had long since retired to his room, to entertain himself to who knows what ends, only emerging occasionally to try to join in on the conversation briefly before returning to his lair.
His mother, in the meantime, had become insistent on the idea of feeding me, and made a pot of rice, and revealed some of the food she had brought down to give to Paul (who would invariably allow it to grow wretched and moldy in the refrigerator). Sure enough, she produced some of her homemade kimchi, and served it with the hot rice and sheets of nori. She assured me that it had not been prepared with fish sauce or any of the like, so I enjoyed it tremendously, although in retrospect these days, I have some doubts about the whole scenario.
In any case, it was delicious, and I finished the plate, until it was replaced with another. The bottle of sake was becoming lighter and more transparent as Paul's mother was growing flusher and rambunctious. She had eventually come to the point of slapping my ass every 15 minutes or so and shouting out "Gay boy!".
I retired to my room as politely as I could, and immediately called a close friend, not just to tell her of the absurd direction the night had taken, but more so to prove my preoccupation in my room should Paul's mom insist on finishing the bottle altogether.
Recently, Sam stole an issue of VegNews home from work, having caught glimpse of a recipe for bánh bao, or perhaps more accurately, baozi, as well as a recipe for kimchi. I looked it over and was pretty excited about being able to make my own kimchi, and was even more excited to see that it didn't take nearly as long as I had originally imagined. I joked that, being jobless currently, I could probably only afford to eat a diet of rice and kimchi from now on.
The first batch I made a few nights ago ended up being far spicier than I had planned. As my roommate Stacie pointed out before trying it, "It's hot for you?".
It's still edible, even enjoyable, in my opinion, and I'm still working through the batch, now that it's been transferred to a plastic container. The move was actually spurred not by better accessibility to eating directly from the container, but because the Ziploc bags I had made the kimchi in turned out to have slowly been leaking inside of our produce drawer in the fridge. The last thing anyone wants is the smell of pungent Asian food overwhelming their entire refrigerator. No amounts of baking soda would help.
So now, I have a burning in my belly, reminiscent of my first taste of whiskey. I picture the fiery kimchi working medical wonders in my intestinal tract. I think about all the bacteria transplanted into my body on cabbage arks and the wings of scallion doves. And as my insides broil with their heat, like rolling magma in the bowels of our planet, I imagine a small world beginning to take shape within the darkness I will never pierce.
I have some vague memories of either trying it, or simply being around it as a child. If anything, Asian families seem to love all manners of foods, pickled and preserved into eternity. The smells of these exploits, especially those involving the infamous fish sauces of that noxious dragon of the Orient, are legendary, and I should qualify that even if I didn't directly consume fermented potions, I surely experienced them all the same.
My real memory of kimchi in recent memory was when I lived about ten blocks and three years down the street, in a small brick apartment complex, half sunken into the grass, but threatening anyway to topple over into the parking lot and roll down into the Olentangy River. With a messy grin, the dumpster in the lot loomed greedily over a sad plot of what appeared to be a failed pepper garden.
My roommate at the time was half Korean. His mother, allegedly, was a descendent of the Korean royal family: a numbered child of a numbered wife. I was told how her brother and her used to go up into the mountains early in the morning and practice traditional tae kwon do and tang soo do. That is to say the mystical sort of legends, taught by white-browed masters grunting approvingly as dishevelled students punch trees and thrust their fists into sacks of grain.
As far as I could piece together, Paul's father, scarred by chemical fires and dirty blood left the Korean War with a new bride in bag, a silent wife ready to take leave from her homeland, and like Orpheus, resisting the temptation to look backwards. Only there was no lover hot on her heels - indeed, she was the Eurydice as soon as this story crosses the ocean - but only the body of her brother, with an arrow in his chest, like the last coloured belt to prove his martial arts achievements.
Dirty blood ran in the family, however, and Paul was told his kidneys were failing while he was in high school. He was expected to maybe have a year left. He chose to keep it to himself. Maybe he wanted to spare his teenage friends the distress of worrying about somebody else's problems, greater than their own. Maybe he had come to terms with it. And after all else is said, after all logic has coursed through one's veins like the flu, there is maybe that fear of mortality.
It was enough to turn anyone into a God-fearing Christian.
And so he somehow made it into college, sitting next to me in my first university math course, wherein I discovered what my future didn't hold in store for me, and I devised ways to derail myself from the tracks my father had waved me off on. I don't remember the first words we really said to each other, but desperate for friends after having been displaced for the n-th time in my life, I was ready to concede to the first awkward engineering student talking about something other than the major. We spent our freshman year playing video games and cooking pasta in his rice cooker, the only legal heating element in the dorm rooms.
So when we moved in together, I don't suspect it had much to do with anything other than our relative isolations in the sea of alien undergraduate students. It was convenience. It was a year in which I discovered other friends, found a bike to get myself around, and struggled to push myself out of the womb of my freshman year into the hands of Columbus's closed-door parties and shows. Paul was an umbilical cord to my freshman year, the last real connection I had to those days, and rather than riding out on my ankles like Jacob and Esau, I saw him turn more recluse over the next year, becoming more involved with World of Warcraft and talking about transferring schools, or dropping out altogether. His eating habits deteriorated from a daily stint at the Rally's down the street to leaving giant bagfuls of chicken wings in the freezer for months at a time, and barbecue sauce in the pantry that I eventually used in semi-secrecy.
In any case, one of the times that his mother came down to visit us, I found out at the last moment, not only about his mother coming down at all, but also that it was Paul's birthday. It put the visit in context, but I was surprised to not have known about it beforehand.
She took us out to a sushi restaurant in the Short North, happy that I was Paul's friend and roommate in Columbus, and was more than happy to pay for everyone. In fact, she made sure to push her beer over to my side of the table when the waiter was gone, urging me to drink like a white-browed gong fu master, or just a mother hosting a three person birthday dinner party. I picked through the food, unsure of what was vegan and what wasn't, and tried my best to look full and content.
When we returned to the apartment, she was in good spirits and revealed a bottle of sake the size of my shin, declaring that the party was just getting started. Paul never drank, and shrugged off the invitation, leaving me to go shot for shot with his mother, who was becoming increasingly belligerent. Paul had long since retired to his room, to entertain himself to who knows what ends, only emerging occasionally to try to join in on the conversation briefly before returning to his lair.
His mother, in the meantime, had become insistent on the idea of feeding me, and made a pot of rice, and revealed some of the food she had brought down to give to Paul (who would invariably allow it to grow wretched and moldy in the refrigerator). Sure enough, she produced some of her homemade kimchi, and served it with the hot rice and sheets of nori. She assured me that it had not been prepared with fish sauce or any of the like, so I enjoyed it tremendously, although in retrospect these days, I have some doubts about the whole scenario.
In any case, it was delicious, and I finished the plate, until it was replaced with another. The bottle of sake was becoming lighter and more transparent as Paul's mother was growing flusher and rambunctious. She had eventually come to the point of slapping my ass every 15 minutes or so and shouting out "Gay boy!".
I retired to my room as politely as I could, and immediately called a close friend, not just to tell her of the absurd direction the night had taken, but more so to prove my preoccupation in my room should Paul's mom insist on finishing the bottle altogether.
Recently, Sam stole an issue of VegNews home from work, having caught glimpse of a recipe for bánh bao, or perhaps more accurately, baozi, as well as a recipe for kimchi. I looked it over and was pretty excited about being able to make my own kimchi, and was even more excited to see that it didn't take nearly as long as I had originally imagined. I joked that, being jobless currently, I could probably only afford to eat a diet of rice and kimchi from now on.
The first batch I made a few nights ago ended up being far spicier than I had planned. As my roommate Stacie pointed out before trying it, "It's hot for you?".
It's still edible, even enjoyable, in my opinion, and I'm still working through the batch, now that it's been transferred to a plastic container. The move was actually spurred not by better accessibility to eating directly from the container, but because the Ziploc bags I had made the kimchi in turned out to have slowly been leaking inside of our produce drawer in the fridge. The last thing anyone wants is the smell of pungent Asian food overwhelming their entire refrigerator. No amounts of baking soda would help.
So now, I have a burning in my belly, reminiscent of my first taste of whiskey. I picture the fiery kimchi working medical wonders in my intestinal tract. I think about all the bacteria transplanted into my body on cabbage arks and the wings of scallion doves. And as my insides broil with their heat, like rolling magma in the bowels of our planet, I imagine a small world beginning to take shape within the darkness I will never pierce.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)