I love food and yet there are still a lot of foods that I'm coming into late into life. Some I've posted about before. Things like squash and figs were items that I didn't grow up with and so I had no experiences to draw from. Some things were just plain stubborness. Like sushi. I only learned to eat it about seven years ago because I had the typical naive aversion to the idea of eating raw fish. Another is jalapeno peppers. I was afraid of them, I guess, until I cut one up in a burrito and realized that it added so much more flavor and heat. That was about 15 years ago. Or even being as silly as to not putting a flavoring into my hot chocolate. Now I can't stand hot chocolate plain, I have to have some sort of additional flavor added to it.

Kimchi was one of those scary foods. After all, it's fermented cabbage with a reputation for being spicy. Don't get me wrong. I love spicy foods. Yet, here I was having a stubborn obstinance to trying this strange looking concoction of hot cabbage.

How do you like your eggs? Scrambled? Hard boiled? I like mine over easy. I also like a lot of salt. I'm a salt-aholic who dips French fries in salt, not ketchup. So when I eat a hard boiled egg, I use a lot of salt.

I've mentioned before that I'm half Filipina and yet know next to nothing of my culinary culture. Filipinos are known for their balut - the embryonic duck eggs they eat. Turns out they also preserve duck eggs in salt. A few Asian cultures do so, each with a different method. The method I'm using here is not really Filipino, but Chinese, I think. But it is an easier method than making a mud slurry to encase the eggs in like the Filipinos do.

I'm going to be making a recipe that uses these salted eggs as a garnish and so I figured I'd make the eggs first, since they take three weeks.  I used chicken eggs this time, but will use duck eggs next time. The duck eggs are supposed to have a richer yolk.