The backyard.

Lewisburg.

In between the rain showers and gusts of wind, I took advantage of the sunshine to take an amble about the backyard. Among today's interesting sights:



The bright red peonies that, one weekend, burst forth from what had looked like an odd, grassless patch behind the deck. And, hiding in the grass near the blueberry bushes:



A young bluebird, just learning to fly. I'd known that its parents were comfortably nested in the bluebird box, and today's the first day I've seen the female in quite some time. As she and her mate made every attempt to lure me away from the young 'un.

Duck rinds.

Lewisburg.

There's something undeniably delicious about duck. They're not particularly meaty birds, though what you'll find on one is going to have a deep, almost red-meat-like quality to it. In fact, when I buy one, as I did the other day, I'm rarely planning something like roast duck. A chicken's easier to work with, and can feed more per pound of bird. Not to mention per dollar.

I'm pretty well convinced that the best thing about a duck is its fat. It's tasty enough on the duck, though it can be tough to render enough away during cooking to get the skin all crispy. My solution is to avoid the problem entirely. The legs become confit, which is the tastiest duck preparation I know. And not only does it taste great, but a little goes a long way, enough so that Sharon and I can happily share a single confit duck leg for dinner, using it to accent some carefully-prepared vegetables. The breasts will probably end up cured and smoked, ready to be thinly sliced alongside a cheese plate.

The rest of the bird? Well, the bones are going into stock, but that's not so exciting. But carefully trimmed of skin and fat deposits, it leaves me with:



Duck cracklings. They're the duck equivalent of pork rinds. Cut up the skin and fat, render it all down over low heat, and you're left with crispy chunks of duck skin and a significant amount of cooking fat. The duck fat - more than a cup, off of one little bird - will be used at pretty much every opportunity¹. The cracklings, just sitting there on the countertop, have long since been eaten.

And though this is a bit of a digression, I must admit that I rather like pork rinds. Though I've never done anything with them remotely as cool as the pork rind reconstruction on Bent Objects.

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¹By which I mean, every time I remember I have it in the refrigerator. Since olive oil lives within arm's reach of the stove, it's pretty much default when cooking.

Kimchi. Or something like it.

Lewisburg.

Sometimes, making food takes a little time. Plus a little cross-the-fingers wild hope.

But, aside from burying it in the ground, it's pretty much what I'd imagined making kimchi would be like.

The whole process went like this: Matt wanted to make kimchi. He's made fermented pickles before, as well as various alcoholic beverages¹ with varying degrees of success, and this was just another thing to try.

If you're going to make a mess of the kitchen chopping vegetables, you might as well invite some friends. So Karl and I headed over to join in the festivities. Karl's attempted kimchi on two previous occasions, one of which was successful, the other not so much. I have just one failed fermented pickle attempt under my belt. Ruth, our "honorary Korean"², couldn't attend.

Given that early May isn't vegetable bounty season here in Pennsylvania, we made a trip to the grocery store, pretty much clearing them out of chinese celery cabbage. Measurements weren't really all that crucial³ here, so we picked up some daikon, carrots, scallions, garlic, ginger, and dried chillis. We picked up so much cabbage, in fact, that the scale in the self checkout lane kept getting confused until we split it into four groups for individual weighing.

On day one, we chopped cabbage, grated carrots, sliced daikon and added a hefty salt brine. Matt didn't have measuring spoons, so we just ballparked it:



Three containers, full of vegetables and salt water, sat overnight beneath weights. The next day, we drained off the brine and took a taste. The book recommended rinsing only if the cabbage tasted too salty, so we left it as is and started chopping the rest of the ingredients: piles of scallions, a good quantity of ginger and chillis, and loads of garlic. Enough garlic that the entire basement smelled of it for the first day. Maybe it still does, and I'm simply accustomed to it.

With the aromatics went some mashed anchovies, a good dose of fish sauce, and a couple of dollops of fermented red bean paste Matt's fiancee had picked up in Korea. Some more brine went on top to keep it all immersed, and then we covered them back up again. Matt and Karl have been keeping theirs in the kitchen; mine's been living in the basement.



In the Fermentarium, to be precise. To digress briefly: the previous owners of our house had the basement enlarged from the contractor's original drawings to create a full-height space instead of a crawlspace beneath part of the house. It had been a wood shop, loaded with all sorts of equipment, and with its own door⁴. I don't have that sort of power-hungry equipment, so now it's home to lots of shelving that may or may not be used for homebrewing, fermenting pickles, dry-curing meats, aging cheeses, and maybe even some miso. If there's a place in the house for promoting all sorts of microbial shenanigans, it's the Fermentarium.

In addition to letting the kimchi ripen in a cooler place, I added extra salt to my brine to further slow the process. Matt's is already pretty much set, but I'm letting mine get funkier. We compared them last week. The difference wasn't great, but enough that you could tell. We'll try again sometime soon.

In the meantime, I have some pleasantly spicy pickles, redolent of garlic, with a sour pickle funk that evolves every day:



Maybe I'll bury the next batch in the backyard. Just to see what happens.

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¹Ciders and ginger beer, at least that I've tried. I've yet to have him over for a beer-brewing afternoon.

²She's not the least bit Korean, but she has made successful kimchi before.

³For one thing, we'd left the book with the recipe at Matt's house. Not that it was too terribly specific on this point.

⁴With a hefty deadbolt on it. This, despite the fact that the exterior access door to the basement had no lock. So, presumably, thieves could walk in and steal anything in the house except the lathe and drill press.