Kimchimeree

Yesterday Chad and I scored an unexpected find: we discovered spicy locally made You Betcha Kimchi for sale at the NE Farmer's Market. I'm happy to be on the kimchi bandwagon. In fact, I'm a fan of food trends in general. Even when they are silly and annoying, they often increase our awareness of and access to foods that are new to us. Okay, the trend to put pumpkin flavor in everything may be out of control, but it's also become a rather comforting and familiar sign of fall. As far as I know, no one is selling pumpkin-flavored kimchi. Yet. But last fall I did try some acorn squash with kimchi and it was pretty good, So maybe there is some kimchi and pumpkin combination that will work...ooh that could be the flavor I enter in next year's Lay's potato chip contest!

While I'm happy that the joys of kimchi are now being brought to the world at large, I'm not a kimchi fan because it's trendy. I've been loving it for over twenty years, long before there were even hipsters to put it on their hotdogs and pizza. This is important to me not because I think my status as an early kimchi adopter makes me cool (okay, it does make me a little cool), but because I learned about kimchi from my brother.

There's not really a story about this (no "Great Luedtke Kimchi Saga of 1990"), just a connection to my brother, my sister-in-law, and my mom that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. My brother and his wife introduced my mom and I to kimchi when we visited them in Hawaii. When my brother was in the army he was stationed in Korea, so they took us to a Korean restaurant in Hawaii and we had our first kimchi experience. I'm pretty sure my mom and I were hooked right away. Kimchi was exotic and eating it made us feel very cosmopolitan. And yet, kimchi made "sense" to us. Not to belittle either kimchi or sauerkraut, but kimchi is really just Korean sauerkraut. As members of German Midwestern family, we were certainly experts at eating fermented cabbage.

Colleen cruising for kimchi in Hawaii

I'm sad about so many things that my mom has missed since her death, including the rise of kimchi. My mom would have felt so hip and superior that she was in the know about kimchi way before the masses. And given her penchant for dramatic storytelling and bragging about her children, she probably would have told everyone that Charley and Chris not merely introduced her to kimchi, but in fact, invented it.

As is often said, food is emotionally charged for most of us. Food is not only a direct visceral link to our memories, but it can also be a symbol of our aspirations. For me, kimchi is both. Oh yeah, and it's pretty damn tasty.