Happy Monday, lovely friends! Since the start of wedding season I’ve been feeling a bit bedraggled. I often feel like I’m chasing the minute hand on a big clock, furiously trying to get ahead of it even while the hour hand inescapably moves on its path. Where did the hours go? How is it already almost July? July is an important month for me – it’s always been the mark of mid-summer, the month of July 4th celebrations, my birthday, and anticipation of humidity in Boston. But it’s in JULY. A month far in the future, to be anticipated. Now it’s right around the corner. June is crazy. It’s officially the crazy but beautiful month. Morning dashes to the shower, dragging Annie to the park telling her to hurry up and do her business while pretending she’d understand and comply, converting to Bostonian traffic-isms and finally letting out my road rage. But it’s also the ultimate wedding month. We have weddings every single weekend plus engagement/rehearsal dinner sessions. No matter how busy we get and how little sleep we manage to steal, it’s worth it. We’re photographing love. Sorry for the sap, but we just had an amazing awesome love-filled wedding. Having done so many weddings, I think I’m pretty seasoned and won’t tear up during ceremonies anymore. But this. This one was so beautiful, so touching, and so darn magical that I couldn’t help but being to tear up. I love these guys so much. I can’t wait to blog about it on my photography page. And this little tidbit about their reception really hit home for me: As part of their centerpieces they had pots of herbs: cilantro, mint, basil. They provided little scissors next to these pots. Guests could use said scissors and snip some herbs and distribute it in their drinks or food!!! Isn’t that just so cute and amazing? I love it. Now I want to have a dinner party with basil as the interactive centerpiece.
This little outburst brings me to this post: kimchi pork belly pies. I actually made these several weeks ago but just didn’t have time to edit all the photos and put it together in a post. With everything going on I’ve had difficulty finding time to really blog. I have so many ideas floating in my head, but each idea takes hours to execute. Food blogger friends – am I right?? There’s recipe development, then testing, which arguably is the most important and time consuming part, then photography, editing, and writing. Then all the social media stuff that makes my head hurt sometimes. However, it’s FUN!!!!! I love fiddling around in the kitchen with a challenge – to make something new and weird and hopefully awesome. Of course, new being the relative term – hand pies exist but I wanted to do a riff of it, in my own way. Then photographing it and styling – you know how much I love doing that! I had leftover kimchi and bossam from last time, so stuffing them in pies was the natural next step.
Imagine going to a friend for tips on making kimchi, and not only does she go above and beyond, giving me advice directly from her mom, but she also describes another dish, home-style: you make boiled pork belly with minimal flavoring, so that the pork flavor is uncompromised. You boil it until it is super tender and will melt in your mouth. Take a thin slice of it and wrap it in a whole leaf of kimchi. Put the whole thing in your mouth. The sour, tang, and spice of the cocooning kimchi will seep into the pliable pork belly and the textures of almost crunchy kimchi and soft pork belly will meld together in a perfect marriage of senses. Of course, I paraphrased and embellished because I do not have photographic memory, and I did not write down her word-by-word quote, but essentially she described an amazing one mouthful experience that I could not NOT try. I’ve been really excited and bursting with eagerness to blog about this. It’s my first fermentation experience and I’m officially obsessed.
The photo above is what the napa cabbage looks like before fermentation but after the overnight brine. The leaves will be flexible so that you can stuff radishes/carrots/scallions between the leaves. This is a very photo-heavy post, because I’m going to show you the step-by-step for not only the brining process, which some say is the hardest part of making kimchi, but also the yangnyum sauce, stuffing the kimchi, and using it to make bossam. All step-by-step, and by the advice of my two amazing friends from Korea, Bomin and Matt.
I’m not going to pretend to be a kimchi expert, because I’m not. My parents are from Shanghai so I have no family tradition of burying kimchi and fermenting it for ages, but I think kimchi is personal. Kimchi is unique to every family and is flexible enough that you can develop your own way to do it. Some families use fermented anchovies, others use fermented shrimp, or some just use fish sauce. Some bury it for months. Some make the sour kind and just ferment at home. Kimchi is personal. I came up with this with a lot of help from my friend Bomin and learned more about different types of kimchi from Matt. They were both dear friends from college, and we were all architecture students. We were in the same studio, sitting next to each other, so you can imagine all the late-night sleep deprived chats we’ve had. Oh, the memories. 
le jus d'orange | food & photography 