Now they tell me
Dec. 3rd, 2012 02:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceWhat I wanted was preserved ginger in syrup. I scoured the stores, and found none; and wrote it up as yet one more thing not commonly available to Americans; and bought crystallised ginger instead because, y'know, I can work with that. It's not what I wanted, but hey.
Then I came home and found the internet full of recipes, how to preserve your own ginger. Of course you can preserve your own ginger. Why did it never cross my mind? I had seriously-fresh ginger, too, a couple of weeks back, courtesy of nice friends and a farmers' market in the city. Sigh...
In other ginger-related news, there was a news story on the BBC this morning about a man being charged with smuggling garlic into the UK, disguised as ginger root. I may have blinked. Ginger's more expensive than garlic, y'know? But ah - garlic is taxable, where ginger is not. I may have blinked again, before I decided that it must be because you can actually grow garlic in the UK, but it's really not warm enough for ginger*. Taxes to reduce foreign competition with the home-grown? That's all I've got, but I thought the WTO was against such practices...
In other other ginger-related newses, I have bought many dried fruits today, plus the ginger hithertofore mentioned, and I am now going to heat them with spices and alcohols and then leave them to infuse for a week before baking them into a cake. This is a technique I haven't tried before, but it sounds good to me; and I did promise Karen a Christmas cake, so it behooves me to make at least one. At least. There's another less-traditional recipe I'm also terribly tempted by; and my books are in Mexico, so I can't fall back on the old standards, so...
(Also my favourite Xmas pudding recipe is in Mexico, grr, and not going to reach me before Xmas. But that's tomorrow's problem. Today, we cake.)
*This didn't stop me having my protagonists grow ginger as well as garlic in my UK-analogue, in my unwritten Spicefarers fantasy trilogy, where all the magic comes from spices. I do so want to write those books, damn it, but no one's interested...
Then I came home and found the internet full of recipes, how to preserve your own ginger. Of course you can preserve your own ginger. Why did it never cross my mind? I had seriously-fresh ginger, too, a couple of weeks back, courtesy of nice friends and a farmers' market in the city. Sigh...
In other ginger-related news, there was a news story on the BBC this morning about a man being charged with smuggling garlic into the UK, disguised as ginger root. I may have blinked. Ginger's more expensive than garlic, y'know? But ah - garlic is taxable, where ginger is not. I may have blinked again, before I decided that it must be because you can actually grow garlic in the UK, but it's really not warm enough for ginger*. Taxes to reduce foreign competition with the home-grown? That's all I've got, but I thought the WTO was against such practices...
In other other ginger-related newses, I have bought many dried fruits today, plus the ginger hithertofore mentioned, and I am now going to heat them with spices and alcohols and then leave them to infuse for a week before baking them into a cake. This is a technique I haven't tried before, but it sounds good to me; and I did promise Karen a Christmas cake, so it behooves me to make at least one. At least. There's another less-traditional recipe I'm also terribly tempted by; and my books are in Mexico, so I can't fall back on the old standards, so...
(Also my favourite Xmas pudding recipe is in Mexico, grr, and not going to reach me before Xmas. But that's tomorrow's problem. Today, we cake.)
*This didn't stop me having my protagonists grow ginger as well as garlic in my UK-analogue, in my unwritten Spicefarers fantasy trilogy, where all the magic comes from spices. I do so want to write those books, damn it, but no one's interested...