Kimchi, part 1

Usually when bloggers get book deals the results are underwhelming. Publishers know that the successful blogger has a wide enough readership to ensure that the book will sell and the blogger has usually been harboring fantasies about being recognized for their talent, using their hobby to pay the bills, becoming rich and famous, blah blah blah and gets sucked into their own hype. Not that there is anything wrong with any of that, but the two mediums of blogging and book are rarely compatible.
Bloggers usually start out bursting with passion for their subject with random stream of consciousness posts. You get a glimpse into their lives and the personality really comes across, there is little censorship and it's all incredibly genuine. All of this tends to get smoothed out in the editing process and the resulting books, in my experience, are a little bland, generic and overall flat.
I'm not trying to be an asshole, writing is hard, especially when you put yourself out there for internet trolls like me to judge, but I have seen some of my favorite bloggers produce meh sort of books and it's depressing.
The worst is this guy, I fell in love with him and used to have dreams about big surly men in black suits. His writing was absolutely beautiful, but by his own admission, he put no effort in the book and it was unrecognizable as his work.
The Tipsy Baker is probably my favorite blog, it's the reason I started using my cookbooks and writing about them. I waited to buy Make the Bread, Buy the Butter, so afraid that it too would be afflicted with the blog-to-book curse. And all of my fears were unfounded, Jennifer Reese is a professional charmer. Plus this book is small enough to carry on the tube so I could read it for a bit of escapism on my commute every morning (I one point I was so obsessed with this guy that I printed out about 30 pages of his archive material so that I could read it when I was away from my laptop. Sad, sad girl).
More so that the style, I like the premise of the book. I identify with the practice of spending a quarter of your salary in equipment for a hobby you might or might not take up (possibly sausage making, probably not beekeeping), I want to be self sufficient in the kitchen, I hate buying products with weird additives.

The first thing I settled on was kimchi, so that I could late try her recipe for amazeballs sounding kimchi quesadillas. Latino Asian fusion is a big thing in LA, apparently.
The recipe calls for a cup of whey to promote the fermenting process, which I'd never considered doing before because I usually expect pickles to be vegan, but it would be interesting if it would have any kind of extra tang. For the heat I used Gochujang from New Loon Moon Supermarket, which I am obsessed with.
So anyway, I merrily set it all up and went on my way to the boyfriend's mum's house for the prescribed 5 days. This is what I got when I returned.
I'm sure a person like my dad would just scrape all the fur off and tuck in to the stuff underneath (it did smell pretty good), but unfortunately not me. Maybe next time