When it comes to food, we have yet to meet a cuisine we don’t like. Korean is one of the top favourites at the moment. In particular, the Teen loves Kimchi so I decided to put together a recipe. Any one I found on line required buying additional ingredients. I designed a recipe using things I already had in the cupboard. It’s not authentic but the Teen was very pleased with the result and deemed the taste pretty close.

I so enjoyed making this. The smell in the kitchen was deliciously fragrant. A lot of chopping but very straight forward to make. And it was worth it given how little it costs to make from scratch compared to how much it costs in the shop.

While some recipes said it could be eaten right away, others said to leave the mix for at least a week before opening and to store in the fridge for up to two weeks after. This was left for a week and it was really delicious. One thing I did notice, however, The mixture swells when put into the jar so we were very careful opening it in case it exploded!

Ingredients
1 head, Savoy cabbage
2 carrots, grated
8 radishes, grated
5 scallions, shredded lengthwise
2 in fresh ginger, grated
3 cloves garlic, chopped finely
2 tsp chopped chilli from a jar*
8 ozs, table salt
1 oz, sugar
7 fl oz, rice wine vinegar
2 fl oz, fish sauce or light soya sauce
2 fl oz, lemon juice

Method
1. Shred the cabbage finely
2. Add the salt and cover with water
3. Cover and weigh down
4. Leave for an hour and a half to allow the cabbage to soften
5. Mix all the other vegetables in a large bowl with the ginger, garlic and chilli
6. Rinse brine off cabbage and dry off
7. Add to the other vegetable mix and massage cabbage into the rest of the ingredients
8. Put into a large jar and press down to pack it all in
9. Gently heat the vinegar, fish sauce/light soy sauce and sugar until sugar is melted
10. Add the lemon juice
11. Pour warm liquid into jar and seal tightly
12. Leave for at least a week to ferment. Store in fridge for 2 weeks after that

• I used chilli from a jar as I know the strength of it rather than fresh chillis which sometimes need some guesswork as to how spicy they are.