Spiritual Kimbap

A few Sundays ago, my brother mentioned to me and Arah, one of my best friends, during breakfast that he was craving some kimbap. (Kimbap is a Korean version of sushi. It has rice and vegetables wrapped in seaweed.) Being here at Andrews, we don't get to eat a lot of home-cooked Korean food and there are many times when we are even craving simple side dishes like kimchi. We've learned to not take the food that our moms cook for granted, but that's a whole different subject. Arah and I went back to our dorm rooms and we sat around doing nothing for a few minutes. We were trying to decide what we could do in the afternoon when the same idea occured in our heads at the same time. Make kimbap! We had no ingredients at all, but we were determined to make kimbap, so we walked all the way to the Korean Oriental store in downtown Berrien Springs. We also had to stop by Apple Valley on the way back to get some vegetarian meat so just getting our ingredients more than 2 hours. When we got back, we realized that neither one of us actually knew how to make kimbap, let alone cook in general. We tried to make do of the little knowledge that we kind of had in making kimbap. It got very messy, as we burned the eggs several times, spilled oil all over the place, and we had a hard time cutting the hard vegetables with a small fruit knife. The whole ordeal (including getting the ingredients) took about 3.5 hours and by the end of it, we were exhausted and we weren't even sure if the kimbap was tasty.

Thinking back, it was really fun making the kimbap, especially because half the time, Arah and I had no idea what we were doing and we would make up stuff. I think the best part of it was when we gave it to my brother and his friends, and they all complimented it and said it was really good (although truthfully, we put a little too much salt in the rice and the veggie meat tasted a little funky). Eating and watching my brothers and our friends eat the food that we made, I experienced such joy and happiness that I probably wouldn't have felt if we had been eating the highest quality kimbap made by the best kimbap chef.