Kimchi Festival!

Hello to all our readers!!!



This is a bit of a belated post :p ....but we thought that it would still be a good event to share with you guys :)

In early November (obviously last year) we went to a Kimchi Festival. Although it is called a "Kimchi Festival," please note that the word "festival" is used quite lightly over here in Seoul and all it really means is an "event." :) The Kimchi "Festival," was part of a military community program called "The Good Neighbor Program." The whole purpose is to encourage the U.S. citizens stationed over here to do things with the local Koreans. So for this particular event, about 60 people met on base, where we then got on a bus and drove out to a Kimchi farm about 2 hours away so the Koreans could teach us how to make Kimchi! Oh by the way, they didn't speak any English, so we pretty much had to decipher their sign language and what little bit of Korean we knew :) For those of you who may not know what Kimchi is, it's.....well....check out the pictures below and see!

This picture is the table we were going to work on, before they brought out the goods :)

This is called daikon radish :) It is basically an oriental radish.... :)

They dumped a whole bunch of it on the table.......

Then they added these massive buckets of spicy sauce made from pulverized red peppers and oysters.

It was a lot of fun mixing it together :)

Here Keni is helping Mom put on her apron (it was quite messy)....Dad, and Keni opted out of the whole process in order to take pictures and watch the babies.
(this is Dakota posting by the way :) )

As we kept mixing, they kept adding a variety of vegetables....such as green onions etc.

Then once we had it sufficiently mixed in......

It was time to add the cabbage!!! (I will explain a bit more later, but this is not the beginning phase for the cabbage)

The whole point here was to mix the red pepper-vegetable-paste mixture into the cabbage.

Loving it!

Bella and the other little kids had their own Kimchi making area. After all, we sure can't have those grubby little nose-picking fingers in our Kimchi! :) LOL!

All smiles
:) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :)

Once everything is all mixed in the Kimchi gets stored fairly tightly in these plastic containers. (back in the day they used to use Kimchi Pots)
They even gave us a tub to take home for ourselves!

Kimchi is a staple food over here in Korea. All the Kimchi that we made (besides the tubs they gave to us) went to the needy people that lived in the local area.

After we finished mixing in the sauce with the mountain load of cabbage (which took about 2 hours) they then showed us how to prepare the cabbage for the whole mixing process. You simply give it a salt bath then let it sit in salt over night, this way it is pliable when you mix in the red sauce. Cool huh?

What was also cool was that they let us go into their cabbage houses and pick out a few heads of cabbage so that we could make our own Kimchi at home. :)

Our loot!

All in all, we had a great time learning how Kimchi is made, and had a very fun time working with the Koreans at the Kimchi farm. I think we will probably do it again this fall :)

Until next post! Blessings :)

Dakota