My kimchi.

Sundays are inextricably linked with pickled cabbage for me. When I was small, Sunday was jook day with my dad, a post-church ritual involving hot rice porridge, tiny dried shrimp and a can of pickled cabbage.* My mother, fearful of her children OD-ing on salt, always put away the pickled cabbage before I had my fill, so I remember those mornings as warm and slow and filled with an aching desire for more slippery, crunchy, salty bites of pickled cabbage.

Making red cabbage sauerkraut.

So when I heard about Machine Project's Krautfest '09, a Sunday dedicated to learning how to make not one but two types of pickled cabbage, it was a no-brainer. I was there, despite the long list of items to bring and the napa cabbage brining that had to happen the night before. No one ever said love was easy.

Shredding cabbage on a giant mandoline.

Machine Project was less crowded than it had been during Fallen Fruit's Public Fruit Jam, but the attendees were just as friendly, a buzzing roomful of people excited about making pickles. First we learned the simple art of sauerkraut making from Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, the couple behind the blog Homegrown Evolution. After shredding a head of cabbage, I massaged in about a tablespoon of salt by hand, then dumped it into a small bucket and beat it to a juicy pulp with the bottom of a glass jar. (Others used beer bottles or their fists.) Dump in the other half, beat, repeat -- until all three heads of cabbage sat, mashed and juicy, in the bucket. That was it. In order to age properly, the cabbage must remain submerged in the brine, so we were given plastic zipper bags to fill with salt water and use as sauerkraut weights, along with the instructions to "Pick out anything that looks weird" as the cabbage ages, a process which should take anywhere from a few days to two weeks. To figure out if it's done, "Just taste it," said Kelly. "It's done when it tastes ready to you."

After writing our names on our buckets and stowing them away, it was time to master the slightly more complicated art of kimchi making from the mother-daughter team behind Granny Choe Kimchi, Oghee and Connie Choe. The kimchi ingredient list had sent me to California Market on Beverly the day before, where I had no trouble finding ground Korean chili pepper, a ginormous head of napa cabbage and gat, Korean mustard greens. We were instructed to brine the napa cabbage the night before, peeling off all the leaves and soaking them in a gallon of water mixed with half a cup of salt. We also had to bring a small shredded daikon, a whole head of peeled garlic, a piece of peeled ginger, an onion (which actually should have been a bunch of green onions) and a little sugar and salt.

Mama Choe instructed us to cut up all the cabbage and put it in the bowl along with the chili pepper. Many people had brought the wrong type of chili powder, so Daughter Choe walked around with a giant sack and a teacup, dispensing Korean chili powder to anyone who needed it. Then came the garlic and ginger, crushed in a garlic press, followed by the onion, chopped fine, the daikon and the chopped mustard greens. A tablespoon of sugar and two teaspoons of salt were mixed with a cup of water and dumped in, along with a bit of cooked rice to aid fermentation.

Passing out kimchi samples.

I pulled on plastic gloves and set to work mixing everything in the bowl, massaging the cabbage to soften it. The Choes walked around adding a few pieces of their own mature kimchi to each bowl to help jump-start fermentation. I packed my young kimchi into a big jar and sat back to admire it, pleased at how much it looked like real kimchi.

Choucroute garnie.

Kimchi making was over, but there was one last pickled cabbage pleasure: choucroute garnie, the Alsatian specialty of cooked sauerkraut and smoked meats, made for us by Jean-Paul Monsche, an Alsatian friend of the Homegrown Evolution crew. Before we dug in, Jean-Paul told us a bit about the history of the dish and the special place it holds in Alsatian culture. He claimed his rendition wasn't perfect, but I thought it was fantastic, redolent with smoky meat, the sauerkraut mellow and tender. Perhaps I should have been born in Alsace, where my consumption of massive amounts of pickled cabbage would have been a point of regional pride rather than cause for alarm.

I'm so proud of my kimchi.

Oh well. The 10 pounds of cabbage currently fermenting in my kitchen will hopefully help me get over the childhood trauma of never having enough pickled cabbage.

* Pam of Rants and Craves recently wrote a lovely post about her own weekend jook mornings with her family. She strikes me as the kind of mom who would let her boy eat as much pickled cabbage as he wanted though.