Flowers and Chocolates and a sticky kitchen floor

Happy Valentine's Day to you all.

The hubs gave me red roses and we exchanged chocolates and cards. Pretty nice day!

This has nothing to do with Valentine's day (as you will see). But I found a great recipe the other day and tried it out last evening. When I have chinese food (at home) I love to have sweet pickled ginger with it. The sweetness is great with the soy of the chinese food. The recipe said when you get sushi at a restaurant you are given washabi (hot enough to kill a person) and the sweet pickled ginger (nummers). I recently purchased a small container of the sweet pickled ginger at the grocery store. Its a bit spendy. So I went searching on the internet for a recipe so I could make my own. There were lots of recipes to be found. I got the ginger and a large bottle of rice vinegar at the local asian store - they have the best prices. It took quite a while to peel the skins off the ginger and then to slice it up. At first I thought I'd try slicing the ginger by using a potato peeler. HA! That made it too thin and it would have taken toooo long. So I got my sharpest paring knife and started slicing. It ended up making about a quart. That should last a few days :-> Below is the recipe, in case you are interested in making your own.

Sweet Pickled Ginger (gari)

Thinly slice about 1/2 lb. fresh ginger (young or mature - doesn't matter) and place in a non-reactive saucepan with 1 cup unseasoned rice vinegar, 2 Tablespoons cider vinegar and 1 Tablespoon distilled white vinegar. Add 1/2 cup sugar and 2 teaspoons kosher salt (or sea salt). Stir over medium heat until the sugar and salt are dissolved and the liquid is simmering. Turn off heat and allow ginger to steep and cool to room temperature. Pour into a clean glass jar, cover and refrigerate. Ginger should be completely immersed in liquid.

"The Adventure of the Container of Ginger" (boo, hissss)

I went to the fridge to get the container so I could take this picture - show you all my hard work. I should have left it alone. When I reached for the container it slipped from my fingers and crashed to the floor, cracking the container. The ginger stayed in the container (plastic) but the sweet (super sticky) liquid leaked thru the cracks all over the floor in front of the fridge. I picked up the container and put all the ginger in another container. Luckily I'd saved the extra liquid from last evening in the fridge and it was enough to cover the ginger in the 2nd container. Now I get to clean up the super sticky from the floor! Don't you just love it!!! Thank goodness for Dawn dishwashing liquid. It did the trick.