Food Adventures: Kimbap!

Today is Kimbap day!  

Kimbap is one of my favorite quick and easy dishes to make and it's fun since you can pretty much pick and choose what you want to have in your rolls.  For today, I'm going simple and just adding a few of the most flavorful ingredients that I like.

Ingredients:

3 cups - kimchi

1/2 lb - marinated spicy pork

2 cucumbers

1 pack - 10 nori seaweed sheets

1/2 pack of 12oz picked radish

3 cups of cooked rice

So I know I gave numbers up there - you don't have to follow that to a tee.  I usually roll until I run out of meat and then with whatever's leftover, I make myself some kimchi fried rice.  Yum :9

From top left to right: kimchi, marinated spicy korean beef, cucumbers, nori seaweed sheets, sushi roller, picked radish

So first, you want to spread out the rice onto the nori.  Make sure you get the edges so that when you roll later, the end will stick.  My family doesn't really care for rice, so we spread it really thin, but you as much rice as you like.  After, you simply lay out your ingredients across the row.

Then you row!  What I do is I take the sushi roller and bring it over all the ingredients.  Then I kind of flex my fingers into a fist with the roller to tighten everything.  Then, lifting the sushi roller (but not the seaweed), I roll and roll and roll.  You don't want to roll the sushi roller with the kimbap.

Et voila!  Cut, serve, and enjoy! :)

With your leftovers ingredients, what I do is I make fried rice.  If you have a lot of kimchi left, kimchi fried rice is an easy and delicious option.  I usually fried the kimchi first, then add whatever else ingredients and then the rice and mix.  Adding a bit of korean chili paste sauce makes it even better.  So cheers!

Self-Acceptance

This week for one of my classes, my classmates and I did an exercise where, from a plethora of choices, we had to choose our eight most important things and eight things we just don't care about and it gave me a lot of thought.

Let me give you a bit more background.  This exercise is called the "Adult Values Cards" exercise.  You have three categories.  Things that are important to you, things that are not important to you, and things that are very important to you.  You also have a list of many values, such as intimacy, change, family, etc.  From that list, you need to quickly, and without too much thought, place each item under a category.  Then from your "not important" and "very important" piles, you need to determine your eight most important and least important things.  

What this exercise is what supposed to do is give you an idea of what your values really are and you can reflect on why you placed certain things in certain piles.  

I actually enjoyed the activity a lot and I was a bit surprised (and honestly, a bit worried about some things I wanted to put into "not important" - but that's not what I'm here to talk about) about what I chose to put where.  When I was done, I only had five items in each pile.  I don't really remember what was in each pile, but the one I was most surprised about was that I had "self-acceptance" under my "very important" pile.  Everything else in that pile made sense to me - I had things like family and hope - but self-acceptance made me think of my past and my present and my future.  In other words, it really made me reflect. 

I'm not going to go into minute details about my past, but I've always had problems socializing and relating with other people and I always had issues with myself for it.  As I grew older, I kind of realized that everything I was doing, I was trying to please someone or get them to like me and everything I was doing was backfiring.  In fact, I'm still doing it.  Notice that above, I said I was worried about things I wanted to put into my "not important" piles.  I couldn't make myself do it because I was afraid of what my classmates would think about me when they saw something like "justice" under "not important".  Even now, I'm resisting the urge to explain myself.  In fact, because I only had 5 items in each pile, I went back to look through the piles again and I found myself putting things into very important that I really didn't find that important for the same reasons.  Immediately after the exercise, I regretted not going with what I really wanted to do because I let someone else determine my actions.

Doing this exercise, I realized I needed to accept myself.  I think I always knew that I needed to like myself before others could like me, but it was never a thought that I took into action.

So what am I going to do?  These are going to be my goals:
1.  I am going to be kind to myself.  If something happens, I will thinking about it rationally before blaming myself.
2.  I am going to stop caring about how others think of me.  I don't mind I'm going to start farting in elevators or anything, but I'm going to try saying what I want without thinking too much about the other person thinks about me.  This will be kind of tough, going into the professional world, but I'll figure this one out.

I can't really think of a third goal, but I think those two are plenty enough for now and will be hard enough for me to accomplish.  I'm going to give myself this semester to work on these goals and will report back at the end of December or early January.

Cheers friends and wish me luck!