Thursday 7 August 2014

Strawberry picking and making Kimchi

The window for this crop of strawberries is closing fast (the next one is in about 2-3 weeks) so the kids and I went strawberry picking today.  We had hoped to pick some raspberries, too, but the bushes were picked clean of ripe ones so we'll have to wait until next week, or go to another farm.

The kids were very enthusiastic about picking the biggest strawberries!  Unfortunately, the biggest ones were also the ones that were quite overripe.  LOL  Oh well, I still can use them in smoothies or desserts were squishy berries won't matter.

I froze 2 baking sheets of firm berries and 1 baking sheet of squishy ones.  My freezer is filling up with beautiful berries.  I just bagged 9 pounds of blueberries, today, too.  Save-On-Foods had a sale on BC Blueberries for $1.99/lb but because I bought them on the first Tuesday of the month, I got an additional 15% off.  Yay!  Add to that the 3 full bags of Saskatoon berries from the picking we did a couple of weeks ago.  Soon will be raspberries, too.

Here's the strawberry haul, and Isabella working away:




After we got home, and finished cleaning and freezing the strawberries, I started working on my kimchi.  Last night, I picked, washed, and chopped up all my Chinese cabbage.  I salted it, weighted it, and let it sit in my office space (the only place that it won't get it the way) until this evening.

Tonight, I rinsed the cabbage well (2 times), and squeezed out the excess water.  Then, I added the remainder of the ingredients (daikon, garlic, ginger, sugar, salt, and Korean red pepper powder).  Now it sits for a minimum of 5 days and up to 2 weeks, fermenting away.  I'm crossing my fingers that this works as I've never fermented any food before.

Here is the bowl of kimchi and it weighted down with jars of water.



Wish me luck that I'll have something edible from this.  LOL


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