Kimbop in Sunol

When growing up in Seoul, my mother would make us a delicious treat of kimbop to take anytime our family would get away to the mountains.  You wrap a harmonious combo of rice, meat, and veggies with a seaweed paper into one tight roll to be sliced into bite friendly pieces.  The humblest version would be just rice(the bop) in the seaweed paper(the kim). My favorite classic filler back then was the egg, SPAM, and takuan- the pickled mooli radish which glows a radioactive yellow.

Yesterday I huffed up the mountains in Sunol with the explicit purpose of creating the ideal conditions to enjoy a box of kimbop.  Kimbop as you can see from the photo can be a labor intensive affair and so in my laziness I relied on a local Berkeley producer Spoon who creates a most excellent barbeque pork version.  Food is much much tastier when you have sweated for it and though I only managed a meager 1200 foot climb,  I wolfed down these rolls with much satisfaction.

The Sunol Wilderness east of Fremont is famous for it's acorn woodpeckers - a species whose unique behavior reminds me much of a puerh collector. These woodpeckers drill holes in dead wood called granaries to store their beloved acorns.  But acorns inconveniently shrink as they age and dry out and so these comic birds spend most of their days fussing over each acorn- moving them in and out of various sized holes to make sure each acorn is secured most snugly.

Woodpeckers like us spend more time in granary maintenance than actually partaking of the acorns.  Who knows how much pleasure and satisfaction a woodpecker derives from a perfect fit.