Kimchi, Kale, and Quinoa

One of my art/craft project: mosaic box

I’m mood driven. I don’t mean “I feel sad” and so I sit in a dark room. Not that that hasn’t happened, only, that is not what I’m referring to now. Maybe it is more accurate to say I function in seasons. They are varied and often unrelated.

Working out, being social, cooking, reading, meditating, art classes. For a season (or several) I’ll have it in my brain that I want to make sure my life is full of that thing…whatever that thing of the moment is. Sometimes the things thread together and inspire a shift in my lifestyle for a while.

Last year it was cooking from scratch and reading. The beginning of this year started out strong with writing, mediation, and exercise…that incarnation seems to have been a short season.

Cooking has remained though. Not every day, but without fail or too much time, I return to it. There is something meditative about cooking for me, something soothing. 

I use to take random art/craft classes…pottery, stained glass, mosaics…because I found them soothing. I love the focus of creating, the stretch of learning new skills, the triumph of a final product. My house is littered with remnants of my previous classes. 

Cooking allows me that same focus, that same creativity, and the same final product…it helps that food is essential for life and my final product is put to wonderful use as breakfast/lunch/dinner. Don’t get me wrong, I love the stained glass piece I made, even as it sits unceremoniously in my window. But if I continue to make stained glass where will it go? Same with mosaics and pottery. In the absence of smaller art projects, cooking wins.

Last year I embarked on journey of randomness…baking brownies, naan, a romesco sauce (which involved charring red peppers in the oven) so that I could make the perfect egg sandwich. The list is long. recipes came from everywhere. I love allrecipes; yummly is ok.

Sometimes, when I dive into a recipe, it requires me to buy ingredients I am unlikely to use again. I’m pretty good about substitutions, sometimes calling on the experts, other times my own palate, but some ingredients are a must. The romesco sauce, for instance, called for hazelnuts and the remaining nuts are still in my cupboard. There was a dish that I don’t recall anything about except it required miso.I disliked the dish greatly but the miso is still at the back of the fridge. I have yet to perfect hummus so a huge container (I couldn’t find a smaller one) of tahini is still in the door of my fridge (how do you know when tahini goes bad?).

Shrug.

My empty vat of kimchi

My finished product

When I decided to try a quinoa, kale, kimchi (gotta love the alliterative sound of it) dish my friend sent me, I had to find kimchi, I was unable to find a small jar of kimchi from Koreana Plaza – my go-to Asian market. I could have gone elsewhere but I figured the chances of good kimchi (and I do love kimchi) were higher there. And so I came home with a huge jar…no…vat…of kimchi.

I live alone and so I cook mostly for one. I figured that kimchi would join the tahini…I was wrong.

I didn’t make the dish once, or even twice, I make it pretty often. At this point I refer to the measurements as a starting point but not prescriptive. 

The dressing calls for soy sauce , sesame oil , peanut oil (I never have this), and ginger. I buy young/small roots of ginger specifically for this dish because otherwise the fibers are tough and I find them distracting when I’m eating. I substitute the peanut oil with olive or vegetable, grate  the ginger as fine as possible, mix it together and set it aside. I like to give the ginger time to release its flavors.

The original recipe calls for a rice/quinoa mix. I do that sometimes, when I have (interesting) rice – which is rare because mostly I use quinoa for everything these days-but I find the mix cumbersome in part because it requires me to cook two different “starches” for the same dish in different pots. I don’t mind intensive recipes but that just strikes me as difficult for no particular reason.

So my quinoa set aside, here I do my own thing. Last night I sautéed cut shitake mushrooms with garlic and onion for a wonderful meaty texture and the beautiful aroma. I threw in spinach instead of kale, not even bothering to wilt it because my quinoa was still hot. I added some raw orange peppers, cilantro, and fresh chives. Slice a 6 minute egg in half and let the oak ooze, sprinkle on the ginger dressing, kimchi to taste, and sesame seeds and the meal is unbelievably colorful and forgiving.

It calls for an avocado but, much as I love that perfect green fruit, I rarely add it. It seems an odd addition and doesn’t have an opportunity elevate or shine in this dish. 

I used the last of the kimchi last night, making space in my fridge for…more kimchi. A dish this good demands to be made with some frequency.

Mistaken

The thing about mistakes is that really they are small things. Mostly. Tiny. Things that, small as they are, have huge consequences. Like grains of sand on a dune spiraling downward, disrupting its neighbors until it all come cascading down the side, burying everything in its wake. Like a tiny snowflake barreling down a mountaintop, freezing to other flakes and careening down into an avalanche to bury and freeze everything below.

Mistakes start out so innocuously. 

And in a moment that you can’t get back, they become so much bigger. In a moment you can’t get back they have changed the course of your life- maybe someone else’s.

Of course, everyone makes mistakes. That is the common bit bandied about. Everyone makes mistakes and it is best to learn from them. While everyone does make mistakes, how and when and what kind of damage everyone’s mistakes leave…well that varies greatly.

The thing about my mistakes is that I can usually see the instant things went wrong. The thing I said, or didn’t say. The thing I did or didn’t do. The thing that if I had a time machine, I could blink back to that singular moment and take my life on a decidedly different path.

Only I can’t. 

There are no take-backs, big or little mess-ups there is no undoing, instead I am left to fix what can be fixed and leave the rest as it is. There should be no wallowing. No playing over and over in my mind the way things might have been different. The point is, things aren’t different.

When I first arrived in South Africa, Peace Corps gave us all a copy of The Gift of Fear. I remember very little about the book, all 432 pages, except its overarching theme that fear is a precursor to something horrible. Fear is a gift of sorts, a portent of horrible possibilities. Only, once something horrible happens, fear leaves. In some ways, fear is connected to the unknown (pain). You can’t be fearful of what has already happened. 

I want to believe that guilt or shame or whatever it is that makes mistakes feel so bad (aside from the consequences of them), is the same. That once the mistake is made there is no space for the bad feeling to accompany the error in judgment or miscalculation. Only, it doesn’t work that way for me.

My friend had little patience with me today as I sorted through the freshness of something in my world gone wrong. She saw my distress as self-indulgent, I imagine, or at the very, least unproductive. She wanted me to own my fault and move on; I only managed half of that. She’s right, I know she’s right. All I can do is move on, try to fix what is fixable – yes - but move on. There is no magic time machine. There is nothing that lamentations can do except make me feel bad. And that serves no one.

I’m not quite wired that way. 

I can’t seem to immediately dismiss the icky feeling that messing up fills me with. I carry it – at least a piece of it – with me always. 

It isn’t that I want to. It isn’t that I think it makes me a good person or serves a greater purpose, I know it doesn’t.  I just haven’t figured out how to put them down yet- not entirely. They get lighter over time, recede into the shadows and only pop up periodically, but I do carry them. I’d like to say they help me not to make the same mistakes again…and mostly that is true…but I think the extra weight does at least as much harm as good.

I bought some white sage a while back, thinking that I might want to cleanse my space. Maybe it’ll air our more than my apartment…cleanse my mind as well and let the mistakes, and my lamentations about them, go up in white smoke.