Oh Don, if only I had known you years ago while my father was still alive, this recipe would have saved him a lot of trial (and mostly) error, and saved me a lot of air fresheners!
My dad was a pretty quirky individual, and prone to getting on certain "kicks" of one sort or another, and sticking relentlessly with that particular item/thought/food for AGES. Well, he went through a kimchi phase for a number of months, during which there was never less than three quarts from the local Asian market in the fridge at any given time.
Not satisfied with mere store-bought kimchi, he decided he was going to make his own. And rather than bother his pretty little head to look up an actual recipe, he insisted on doing it his own 'adventurous' way, guessing the ingredients as he made experiment after experiment... after experiment...
His basic premise was that if you put cabbage, vinegar, some kind of hot stuff, and sugar together in a jar and left it on the counter, it would ferment into something akin to kimchi. His initial container of choice was a used sour cream tub, but after the first kimchi bomb exploded and I made him clean the cabbage shrapnel off the underside of the cabinets, he switched to glass jars with the lids left loose. Unfortunately, leaving the lids open let all of those lovely fermenting cabbage aromas seep out into the kitchen and permeate everything on the entire main floor. (Suffice to say it was not helpful for my life as a single girl trying to date-- there just is not enough Febreeze in the world to disguise kimchi-gone-awry smells in your furniture.)
Thankfully, his tastebuds eventually got tired of eating the failed experiments (he refused to throw them away, and would eat them just out of principal to prove to me they weren't really
all that bad and I was overreacting about their pungency.)
He would have gotten a huge kick out of you, Don, and (God forbid), might even have learned a thing or two about successful fermentation!!
