ferment

Something has gotten into me, clearly, for upon getting back from the market I set several different kinds of vegetables to pickling.

Watermelon daikon. This is a lovely round radish with a greenish rind and a pinkish tail, and the pink extends up into the globe of it in magenta streaks that only come into view when you slice into it. It gets the kimchee treatment: I have chopped it into slivers and shut it in with garlic, green onions, ginger, nori, sesame seeds, bonito flakes, a handful of red pepper.

Napa cabbage and beet greens. The cabbage is very white, the greens very dark. I have salted them all down with coarse-grain sea salt, and when enough of the juice of them is leeched out, I will close them up with garlic and red pepper as well. In a few days they will be kimchee.

Pale red and yellow beets with long tails. Once boiled, slipping them out of their skins was like peeling mice. Now they are curled up in the bottom of the dill pickle jar (empty of cucumbers since a few days ago when I chased some vodka shots with them, Russian-style). I tossed in some sliced carrots and turnips on top of them when I saw there was room left over.

How to explain this frenzy of pickling? Modern refrigeration makes this style of preservation unnecessary. I can only think that my internal clock has struck Þorri and commanded me to take perfectly palatable ingredients and perform culinary operations upon them that will render them sour, imperishable, and even slightly painful to consume.