The time has come!

Again, the time has come! What time?? Kimjang time! (preparing Kimchi for winter in Korea) After my first post of Kimjang last year (Here it is if you missed.) I realized many of you are so excited about this Korean long time tradition. So I decided to share the story one more time with you. This is my hubby's (who likes kimchi more than I do.) first time joining Kimjang. After he received my parents' invitation he got extra excited about it. I (who has done this every year) think that's extra nice. For Koreans this is a big load of hard work as a part of preparations for  long and brutal winter time. Lots and lots of itsy bitsy works are required about 2-3 days. So for my family his help is such a relief. :)

I am sorry in advance if you're expecting exciting nice photos. If you cook you know. You will not have a free and clean hands (enough to hold a camera) during your process. Kimjang is one of this kind. The weather is pretty chilly so we all sit down indoor. It means there's no enough natural light, hence the photo could be pretty blurry. Everybody gets bloody-hot-pepper-red-sticky hands. So we just had to take photos here and there in a 'quick' way. Yes, basically not so great photo-friendly situation. Hope you understand though.

My parents already prepared lots of things before we arrived. Picking out (many many)cabbages and radishes from my dad's garden. Washing them and socking in salt water overnight. Washing (lots and lots of) garlic and ginger and skin them. Prepare other veggies and fish juice and... of course clean up many many containers to house kimchi after we finish.

So here me and my hubby took care of crushing garlic and ginger. He's paying a good attention to it as you see. My dad was slicing lots of radishes and my hubby joined to try out. Yes, that's right. Kimjang requires lots of washing, soaking, dicing, slicing and chopping before we start anything. 

 

Finally we all sit together putting all the yummy ingredients together. Getting messier yet more fun. Now time to stuff cabbages with this beautiful red source.

 

While stuffing cabbages everybody got pretty messy hands so we were not able to take photos at that moment. I am so sorry about that. We all got pretty excited at this point and we must've forgot about it.. This is the most fun part I can say. Here's some finished products.

 

 

Finally we put them in containers. Look at those! Pretty cool, isn't it? We will enjoy this until next spring when fresh veggies available again. We already feel happy, cozy and warm after getting this big job done. Yay!! We hear this winter will be extra cold and snowy. But, you know what? At least we have huge stacks of yummy kimchi to finish. We will make lots of good food out of it: kimchi soups, kimchi pizza, kimchi fried rice, scrambled kimch-egg... Already mouth watering, isn't it? :)