Pickles

These days I have been obsessed with pickles. The process of pickling was used as a way to preserve food but then people enjoyed the resulting flavor and nowadays people from all over their world have their own style of pickling.
Koreans is one of the Asian country that has a lot of preserved food. This recipe is one of my favorite and also the easiest.
Chayote is a plant that belongs to the gourd family. In Chinese we call them "buddha's hand" since it has a shape of a close fist. I have also used it to make soup until I tried a pickle chayote at a Korean restaurant.
**One thing you need to know about this plant. It's slimy after you peel the skin off. The sap from the plant dries out the water on your fingers and your hands will be super dry. Some people will even have allergic reaction to it. Try to use gloves when you cut them**

For the pickle, we do not need to peel the skin, but we need to take out the center white part of the plant. Cut them into cubes and find a tight jar for you to store them.

Now the brine. It consists of 1:1:1 sugar, soy sauce and white vinegar. Put them all in a pot and bring it to a boil. Watch the fire because the brine will over boil very quickly.
Once it boils up, pour the brine into the jar of raw chayote.
They float so in order to let it soak up the brine, place a few rocks or something heavy to push them down. Seal the jar.

Let the jar sit in room temperature for  a day or two then you can put it in the fridge.

For a kick, put in a jalepeno (poke a few holes in the pepper). That should give you a sweet sour spicy delicious pickle. ENJOY!

**You can reuse the brine. Just add extra soy sauce and vinegar and give it a boil. Also use hot brine so the chayote cooks a little in the brine but remain crispy.**