How to make kimbap.

Kimbap, or gimbap, is a Korean dish that's a little like sushi, but isn't at the same time. The name sort of explains it all. Kim means seaweed and bap means rice. Anyway, it's one of my favorite dishes here in Korea since it's so cheap at restaurants. I had to make it with my students at Inju Elementary School for one of their classes. Also, all the students knew how to do this already, so they ended up teaching me.

So first you start off with a square cut of seaweed. This can be bought at most supermarkets in Korea.

Then you take some rice and then spread it evenly across the whole thing. You can be as liberal with the rice as you want, I suppose.

The filling is what makes kimbap different. All ingredients should be cut into long strips like these that are the length of the square of seaweed. Here are some of the normal ingredients that I've seen and that I used:

• Pickled radish. I've never seen kimbap without this ingredient actually. I actually don't like it on it's own, but in kimbap it's okay.
• Egg.
• Spam. I see sandwich meats being used pretty often too.
• Cuts of crab, usually the fake kind.
• Carrot strips.
• Cucumber.
• I have no idea what the hell that brown thing in the picture is.
• Other things I've seen used are tuna and American cheese (one of my personal favorites).

Now, you'll arrange whatever you want to put in the roll on top of the rice. I found that it helps if you try to stack and make it compact, unlike the kid in the picture.

Then roll the thing up. I think that this is probably the most satisfying part of the whole process.

Here is how my two turned out. It's usually cut up into slices and then served.

Here's how it can go wrong.