Homemade kimbap

This evening Rachel’s tutoring clients, Erin and Irene, invited Elisa and I over to make homemade kimbap. Their mom is apparently the best cook. I had to see for myself. On the way over to the family’s apartment, I thought about bringing a camera to record this, because I mean, how cool is it to be invited into a Korean home to make kimbap, but I didn’t bring one. Oh well. Here’s a picture of what we would be making, and a description of how it all went down.

Erin and Irene’s mom (I’ll call her Omma, because that’s mother in Korean) had laid out everything on the table that we would need. This included sheets of kim (seaweed paper), a HUGE bowl of steamed Korean rice, and lots of ingredients for the inside of the kimbap. You can see the insides really well in the picture above. She had eggs that were scrambled and laid out very thin, long cut yellow sweet radishes, crab meat, spinich, fish cakes, and chamchi (tuna). We were given plastic food service gloves, so that the kim and the rice wouldn’t stick to our hands, and we proceeded to make the kimbap.

We started by laying out a sheet of kim, and spread out a thin layer of rice. If you get too much in one spot, you end up like me and have holes in the kim paper. Oops! Once you’ve spread out the rice, you put down a layer of egg, and whatever else you want. I chose to pretty much put everything on there. Then you have to roll it. Typically, in a kimbap shop, they use a bamboo roller thing underneath, but we didn’t have that so we had to use our hands. Omma chuckled at me when she saw I had holes in my kim when I rolled it, and she had to cut it for me. It ended up falling apart, but I had no problems eating it like that, it still tasted the same!

We talked to the girls about every day stuff, including how much they liked going to Swaton (apparently the girls had just finished their time at Swaton, they had been there since Kindergarten and made their way up to level 14 before leaving, because they were too young for middle school but too advanced for the kids their age). Rachel told them that she was going to be going to the kimchi museum in Seoul on Saturday, and they were surprised because they had not heard of the museum before.

The girls, their mom and their dad were so hospitable towards us, constantly refilling our water and making sure that we were eating enough. They wanted to make sure that we were happy, and that we were having fun. Omma also invited us back next week, and wants us to experience home cooking, Korean style. I will definitely be back, next time with a house warming present. I just have to come up with something to bring!