Silver Case

1) Tastes good already

2) Fermentation is beginning to take off. My cabbage kimchi was effervescing this evening

He is not amused

Sadly, both the North Korean soccer squad and I failed in our ideological struggles.

The North Koreans? By losing 7-nil on live TV.

Me? By very nearly scoring an own goal on my otherwise very scrupulous calorie counting.

The background, depending on which calculator and which assumptions you make, my daily caloric input for no weight change ranges between 2150-2450kcal. A week of 500kcal deficit = one pound of fat (3500kcal) burnt. I’ve found it pretty easy to assiduously keep <= 1800kcal as long as I monitor closely my intake. Overall, it feels like I’m eating 30% less than I nomally used to. That I’m not hungry even with that amount makes it clear that I was overeating before.

Anyway, so what happened? Saturday is going along as per normal. Then we made all this kimchi. Of course I start nibbling some after we had potted it. NIce spicy, garlicky, salty taste. Every hallmark of a good bar appetizer. Why not have a beer–I was still easily on track for the day.

Then five beers later it was time to drink the korean berry wine I had tossed in the freezer.

Then it was upstairs to watch Rome. With continued itchy-mouthy and diminished self-control, I woke up the next morning to realize I’d eaten the better part of a bag of tortilla chips and an ingot of cheddar choose. “Uh oh, this will not be pretty,” I thought to myself.

And it wasn’t.

Totally boned. I set myself back by five day’s progress rate, over a bunch of beers (good), korean wine (so-so), mass-produced cheddar cheese (not worth it) and tostitos (blech).
When I woke up this morning I had my customery short double latte and got to work gardening. As the day went on it occurred to me that since I’ve been tracking calories closely, I have a finer sense of my appetite. And what I was sensing today was that I wasn’t hungry at all. Hmmmm. So I just ate a small bowl of rice with a huge wad of kimchi before I rode to my workshop. I hate have that low glycogen feeling. I ate a handful of grapes while I was there, and cycled home to another small bowl of rice/kimchi and my customary fruit juice.
So what’s the accounting of this odd day?

I think I managed to neutralize my saturday night own goal!
whew.

Kimchi

Yesterday Matilda and I made many pots of kimchi. I made a huge pot of cabbage, a pot of beans, and two smaller pots of towgay (bean sprouts) and towgay and cubed beetroot. It should be ready to eat in a few days. I’ve tried some of the cabbage already and it tastes really good. I put a lot of pureed garlic and ginger into it. While we were away, Emily kindly ground up the large amount of imported mexican chillis I bought in Pittsburgh a few years ago. I added a lot of that to the kimchi because the korean red pepper, although nicely red, was weak.

I can’t wait to have kimchi and rice for lunch tomorrow. I even have a nice new japanese lunch box for the occasion.

Green bean kimchi

I followed my own muse, adapted from one, two different recipes. The lady at maangchi, against all odds, got me really hungry for korean food (something that otherwise never occurs). The only thing I couldn’t bring myself to do was add chopped raw oyster to my kimchi. Those things make me sick 75% of the time I eat them a proper restaurants, so I can’t imagine what they’d do to me after fermenting in a pot for a week.

bavarian sauerkraut

And while I was busy rotting vegetables, why not rot some cabbage for sauerkraut too? Especially when I had a huge bag of juniper berries, caraway seeds, and bay leaves, to make bavarian-style sauerkraut. I loved the caraway seeds so much last time, that I poured tons into this crock.