v-day

How was your V-day? Ours was good. The day started out with me giving Satoshi chocolates and a card.

In Japan, the guys get all the attention on V-day, if you want to read up on it, I've written something about it here.

As I was returning from the market it began to drizzle and the drizzles turned in to snow!

It ended up snowing the whole afternoon. I loved how the snow fell, it reminded me of white feathers, beautiful!

While it continued to snow, I heard commotion going on outside and decided to check it out, I'm kinda nosy like that.

It turned out something needed fixing, and this poor guy was outside with a plastic sheet overhead.

For dinner, I tried a new recipe.

It was a spicy pork wrapped with cabbage. Of course, I didn't read the recipe properly and ended up detouring a little from the original.

Spicy Pork Wrapped with Cabbage :adapted from ESSE March 2011 issue : serves about 3
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup sake (rice wine)
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 tablespoon shoyu (soy sauce)
1.5 tablespoons miso (soy bean paste)
1 teaspoon tobanjan (chili paste)
150 grams pork, thinly sliced
1.5 tablespoons ground white sesame seeds
3 leaves of cabbage, washed

In a pan, put the first 6 ingredients in and add the pork.
Turn the heat up to high and while mixing, let liquid evaporate.
After the liquid evaporates, add the ground sesame seeds, mix well.

With your leaves of cabbage, heat in a microwave (600W) for 90 seconds. Be careful of the steam and remove the hard stem. Then wrap 50 grams of pork.

Cut in half and serve with rice.

NOTES: The original recipe says to put about 50 grams into 1 leaf for a serving, but my leaves of cabbage weren't too big, so I made about 4 or 5 little rolls as 1 serving and served with lots of rice.

The original recipe also calls for the cabbage to be boiled but since I didn't read it properly, I nuked it.

For dessert we had dark chocolate dipped strawberries. I used Rowena's idea and placed some heart sprinkles that I had.

The day after, the sun came out and started to melt the snow.

p.s. yesterday, we visited MIL and she is happy to be at home. She can't sit on the tatami like she used to nor can she go upstairs to sleep, so she is living on the 1st floor of her house for now.

BIL & SIL take turns daily to check on her and bring her food, and once a week her doctor and a nurse make house call visits to help change bandages and such. It was nice visiting with her though we worry about her getting around her house.

Hope your V-day was a nice one, boy the week went by quickly, hope you have a nice weekend!