To my knowledge there are no Korean restaurants in Amman. I have been in Jordan for about a month now, and last week I felt a kimchi craving coming on. Starting in on various google searches ranging from the reasonable: “Korean restaurant Amman,” to the optimistic: “Kimchi Amman,” I finally found an article by Norimitsu Onishi from 2004 about a community of South Korean missionaries based here. In an act of desperation I emailed him, saying I was working on this episode about kimchi and was trying to get in touch with the Korean community here. After I sent the email I did some further investigation, quickly finding out that he has since become The New York Times Tokyo Bureau chief. I felt mildly embarrassed but even with that knowledge, would have written again.
It happens to me from time to time: kimchi cravings that take over my thoughts for hours and sometimes days. It’s not always easy to find a Korean restaurant; luckily it only takes a quick study of the menu at Japanese or Chinese restaurants to see if Koreans are involved. Sometimes kimchi will be listed as a side dish, or nestled in amongst the salads at Chinese buffets.
The first time I had kimchi I was 13. It was in a Korean restaurant adjacent to a one-stop shopping center called Fred Meyer in Eugene, Oregon. I don’t remember much about the first bite, but I do know that by the end of that meal kimchi had become a major force in my life.
Another Korean restaurant in Eugene, Korea House, become my favorite. In high school I probably ate there a minimum of 3 times per week. In college I would drag friends on long expeditions to remote Virginia suburbs via complicated bus routes to go to Korean neighborhoods where we would eat to our hearts content. In Cairo where I lived for a year, I miraculously found a Korean restaurant one block from my house. There was a phase where I ate there (or leftovers from there) every single day. Kimchi is my comfort food, and I like to be comfortable.
So when I heard about a kimchi harvest festival in Red Boiling Springs, TN there wasn’t a question in my mind that I had to be there. In fact, I didn’t think twice about it until somewhere along the 2-hour drive from Nashville to Red Boiling Springs. Even then it was a fleeting thought: had my love of kimchi had gone too far? But it was too late for questions and Tennessee is a nice state. And that is how I ended up at Long Hungry Creek Farm.
When I arrived at the farm Jeff, Sandor and company were collecting napa cabbage, bok choy and watermelon radishes for the kimchi. This was the second annual kimchi harvest festival. As you can see from the video, the kimchi we made that day wasn’t traditional Korean kimchi, the workshop instead taught the basic principle of preserving vegetables in their own liquid. Listening to Sandor speak during the workshop about the universality of pickling vegetables- how every country in the world has their own form of kimchi, sauerkraut- whatever you want to call it, was reassuring in a sense. Wherever I go, I will find something like kimchi, even if it doesn’t have the particular delicious pungency of kimchi… at this point I am feeling frantic again, and should probably go eat a pickled turnip or something.
By Emma Piper-Burket
