My grandmother's Kim Chi will get you.

I was on the bus in New Malden and I decided to play a joke on the passengers. I surreptitiously felt for a bag of Kim Chi in my rucksack and opened it. I am Korean and I am so used to Kim Chi I can’t smell it. Of course I can taste it. I wanted to see what the reaction of the British passengers would be like.

Soon I heard people sniffing. "What’s that?" An older lady said to her husband. "Very odd," the man said, "It smells like something’s gone off." "No," said the woman. It smells like pickled...pickled.....pickled cabbage."

.

On my right two children stopped fighting for a moment and one looked at the other and said. "You dirtbag." "I haven’t done anything. It was you," the other boy said, and they carried on fighting.

.

At the back of the bus I heard someone whisper to themself. "They really must do something about those drains." And when the bus stopped seven people got off, five people got on and it was crowded, but no one sat on the empty seat next to me.

Kim chi is the most important side dish in Korea. People eat Kim chi at every single meal every single day and people believe that Kim chi is good for your health. I think it's just pickled cabbage with sauce, but during the SARs epidemic people said Koreans escaped because they were eating Kim chi.

.

First you have to grow the cabbage. Kim chi is mainly that - cabbage. We use Chinese cabbage to make Kim chi and it is normally about 40 centimetres long. It has green and white spongy leaves.

The cabbage is usually grown in greenhouses because the method gives you faster results than when they are grown in open fields. When the cabbage is fully grown, it is harvested and washed. After washing it is is packed with salt into a large clay jar about 1 meter high, like an amphora, and it is left in the jar for two or three days. That's the traditional method.

While you are waiting for the cabbage to pickle you have make the sauce for the Kim chi. For the sauce you need many different kinds of ingredients such as: chili, salt, garlic, chopped radish and so on. After the cabbages have been pickled in the clay jar for three days then you need to take them out and wash them again and then mix in the sauce which you have made.

After mixing the cabbages and sauce thoroughly, put it all back into the clay jar, cover it up and bury the jar underground.The best time to eat Kim chi is six months later. If you take the cabbages out too soon then that will not give you the real Kim chi. It will just be a cabbage in a spicy sauce. If you take the Kim chi out too late, then the Kim chi becomes very sour. You won't enjoy real Kim chi this way.

.

Most Korean children hate the taste of Kim chi the first time they try to eat it because it can be too spicy for sensitive taste buds. But in Korea every time we have a meal, whenever there is food, there is always Kim chi on the table: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Kim chi is a side dish and we eat it with rice. Sometimes we fry it and have it with meat. There are even Kim chi pancakes.

When I tried Kim chi for the first time it was quite spicy, so my grandmother washed the taste out with water then gave it to me some rice to clear my palette. I was five or six years old. I only began to like Kim chi after four years of trying.

The reason why I began to like Kim chi is that it is in fact addictive. It’s like a health drug. When I lived in Korea I ate Kim chi three times every single day. But now I am in England, I eat it three times a week. When I was in Korea I couldn't’ live without Kim chi, but now I am managing to eat less Kim chi than when I was at home. l like other foods now.

Despite their insulting comments, I am sure that after 4 years with my grandmother every passenger on that Bus in New Malden would be addicted, like me, to Kim Chi.

By Tae Kim