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Volunteer News
Jiill’s Blog: Kimchi and Meatballs An Email Interview with Jill Wasberg, by Kristina Mannes
Jill Wasberg has been a volunteer at the Nordic Heritage Museum since October 2012. This May Jill expanded on another passion of hers by creating a food blog entitled “Kimchi and Meatballs”.
What was your inspiration for creating a food blog? Why 'Kimchi and Meatballs'? The inspiration for Kimchi and Meatballs comes from a family melding of cultures, foods and ingredients that took place when I was growing up. My mom is from Seoul, South Korea. On my dad’s side of the family, my grandpa was a Finn Swede and my grandma was born and raised in a town called South Bend, a small town in Willapa Bay where several Norwegian and Swedish families historically settled to work in the logging and fishing industries. I’m fourth generation from South Bend. I don’t know how many Korean Swedes raised in small seafood industry towns there are out there, so the audience for my blog might be few and far between! Several of the blog posts about food combine some ideas and ingredients of the different
places in the world that came together at our dinner table – Korea, Sweden and Willapa Bay. My food staples definitely leaned heavily toward Korean dishes, but all of our family gatherings from birthdays to the Fourth of July to Christmas had elements of Scandinavian flavors and forms. I often brought home leftovers from my grandparents’ after whatever family gathering was taking place and threw them in a bowl with rice and kimchi with a soft boiled egg and mixed it all up to scoop up in squares of sesame roasted seaweed. The memory of this habit is where the title of the blog came from. My friend and I were driving back from Portland after a disheartening food truck experience with some bland kimchi. I vowed to start making my own based on how my mom made it— I’d had it with bad kimchi! This got us talking about what type of niche it would take to start a food truck, and I recalled, “You know what goes really well with kimchi is Swedish meatballs.” And she said, “Well, that’s certainly a niche.” But a food truck sounded really time consuming and complicated. And expensive. So I started a blog instead.
Dragon and Viking Deviled Eggs
What volunteer work have you done at the museum and has your experience at the museum taught you anything or inspired you in any way in your cooking? I’ve lived in Seattle for almost 20 years and just visited the Museum for the first time in October, 2012. I don’t know how it came to be that I hadn’t been in before. As soon as I walked in, I told my friend, “This place feels like my grandparents’ house. It even smells like my grandparents’ house!” She had to drag me out of there that day. I would have stayed the night and slept in the section about the logging camp display if I could have. I came home and immediately contacted the Volunteer Coordinator and told her I’d do anything as a volunteer; yard work if they needed it! I helped out at Yulefest in 2012 (a delight!) and then I started volunteering in the gift shop on a regular basis – and this definitely inspired my cooking from that point forward. As I’m interested in food, I immediately pounced on the cookbooks and pored through them. I first went for the contemporary cookbooks, the large coffee table ones with beautiful, glossy photos of open -faced sandwiches set out for picnics under birch trees and venison stews before large hearths with glowing fires. Then I found a connection with the more traditional ones, the spiral -bound paperback editions I’d seen in kitchens and gift shops in my hometown produced by the American Daughters of Sweden or the American Swedish Institute. I remembered