Contest at STC Cooks

Y'all should head over to STC Cooks and enter their cookbook giveaway by November 30. Just tell them about a memorable Thanksgiving and you could win a stack of really nice food books—they're good; I've read most of them.

Kimchi Ferment-along-a-thon!

Please join me and my publisher peeps over at the new STC Cooks blog for the first in a series of posts about making kimchi, Korean fermented cabbage and daikon (or other vegetables; here's a fun list of kimchi types—and some good-looking recipes—from Saveur to spark your imagination). Kimchi is one of the easiest preserves to make yourself: after giving the cabbage and other vegetables an overnight soak in a simple salt brine, you mix them up with a chile powder–orange paste, stuff them into a jar, and just kind of let the whole thing sit there until it tastes good, four or five days. Unlike, say, fermented dill pickles, there's no day-to-day maintenance required. You just leave it alone for a while, then screw a lid on and stick the jar in the fridge. It'll keep for weeks, very gradually becoming a little more sour.

Lots of readers (we hope) are going to make their own kimchi along with us, so if you've been wanting to be part of an enormous online community of enthusiastic cabbage and radish fermenters but didn't know where to start, here's your chance!