Lockdown Day 24: The Sisyphean task of keeping up with the groceries
Sunday morning is family Zoom time, so I had a quick bite to eat before we started - one of my matcha almond cookies. I’ll take that hint of caffeine!
After about an hour and a half, I had to leave all of a sudden. PCR time! I had to quickly change to my outside clothes and put on my face mask (I love the new iOS, where FaceID works with the face mask on!). And I wasn’t one of the first this time, because I was pretty far back in the line. And there were quite a few people behind me.
The poor guy scanning our testing QR codes was wearing glasses, but they were all fogged up with major condensation. It’s probably really hot inside the hazmat suit, and the face is all closed up too.
On my way back upstairs, I noticed that neighbors were starting to leave vegetables for others.
I set about making lunch. On the left, I have the ingredients for Chinese chives scrambled with eggs. On the right, I had ingredients for the Taiwanese dish cang ying tou 苍蝇头, or fly’s head. Except I was using garlic scapes rather than chive flowers, textured vegetable protein instead of ground pork, black beans in Laoganma chili sauce rather than straight black beans, and no scallion. So basically everything except the garlic was a substitution!
For the Chinese chives with eggs, I followed Ajian’s recipe, where he cuts the chives into small pieces and then stir-fries them first in a lot of oil, and then adds in the egg afterwards (rather than put the chives into the raw eggs, or keep the chives in longer strands). I like this method.
He also said that he likes eggs cooked longer, so they become more 香 (fragrant/tasty). I tried that this time too - I usually prefer eggs more soft-scrambled -, and I found that I also liked these eggs with the toasty brown surfaces.
The cang ying tou - despite the substitutions - came out really well. Very satisfying to eat with a lot of rice. And I had white rice thanks to the government delivery!
The thing with Chinese stir-fried food is that there’s a lot of prep work, and a lot of dishes to do. Because preparing the mise en place in advance is so important, for the quick succession of steps during the stir-frying process to happen successfully.
After lunch, I had my pineapple. This one was really starting to go.
But there was still a lot of good fruit left - and what was left was extremely sweet. Even the core was sweet, and I used that later in my carrot muffins.
But first, I needed to get started on the cabbage-wheat flour pizza crust. I first chopped up the cabbage that I baked yesterday to remove water.
So then I halved the amount of flour in the dough. This was perfect for me, in order to use my small-ish food processor attachment on the immersion blender to do the kneading.
I read that the metal blade of a food processor actually does a really good job of kneading bread dough - you can do in 45 seconds what a stand mixer can do in several minutes.
I then combined the flour dough with the cabbage, and covered the bowl with a shower cap to rest.
While the pizza dough was resting, I turned my attention to the carrot muffins. The carrot tops are doing really well, but I wonder why some are starting to get moldy…
In the carrot muffin batter, I put in extra carrot (to use up a whole carrot), as well as the pureed core of the very sweet pineapple, and cut down the white sugar by half. I also used millet flour and whole wheat flour instead of most of the white flour.
Cooking all of yesterday and today, allowed me to make big progress on my vegetable and fruit stash! Here was my starting point yesterday morning.
And here’s the status this afternoon!
By using up vegetables both inside the fridge and outside, allowed me to put in some of the outside vegetables in.
But, just as soon as I celebrated this win, I got a message telling everyone to go downstairs to pick up supplies. I know I should be happy to be well stocked, but…!
This time, the variety was slightly different.
They also shipped using styrofoam boxes, with an ice pack inside. My ice pack was completely melted when I opened it up. But they’re probably trying to do their best with the rising temperatures in Shanghai (after all, last shipment had some parts already rancid, like the tops of my daikon radishes). Still, I could see a ton of un-collapsible waste outside by the trash area.
I’m glad for the second eggplant, excited by the zucchini (haven’t had one in so long), and intrigued by the green daikon 青萝卜.
I had to turn off my oven with the carrot muffins, before going downstairs to pick up my supplies. Not only is my fridge out of space, but all of my shelves and countertops are full, too. I could only cool my muffins on the floor! (You can also see, I’m storing the household products the government has given on top of the radiator.)
Then it was time to check in on the dough again. It seemed to have hardly risen.
And the texture was more like a paste than a dough. That was okay though, because it meant that i could shape the pizza pieces into rectangles that could maximize the surface area of my toaster’s baking tray!
While the crusts were resting, I had dinner. Keeping in mind that I’m completely out of space, I decided to use up my aquafaba in a crustless quiche dish with the cabbage, onion, and mushrooms that I caramelized last weekend. I had originally planned on making a quiche with a crust of potato slices, and a filling of this caramelized concoction mixed with egg and cheese. But that would have created more volume to store in the fridge, so I just did the aquafaba with the cabbage mixture. Could the aquafaba take the place of egg in a quiche?
(I also had some of yesterday’s cucumbers).
Well, I guess the answer is no. The mixture didn’t bind together at all. But it did inspire me to turn this into a soup, since it was still tasty, but quite liquid-y.
After dinner, I finished up this morning’s pineapple (also to remove a container from the fridge!).
And I tasted one of my muffins. Here, I also used aquafaba instead of one of the two eggs. The result was kind of dense but still very good. And I don’t know if the density is only because of the aquafaba, or also because I used millet flour for the majority of the flour. I think millet flour is gluten-free, so it doesn’t provide the same structure as wheat flour.
After dinner, I baked the cabbage-flour crusts for 10 minutes, and was pleasantly surprised to see them puff up and rise in the oven. I’m glad they’re relatively flat though - space-saving in the fridge and freezer! (Amazing how that’s my overriding concern nowadays!)
I also prepared some breakfast in the Xiaomi for tomorrow: a bit of rice, daikon, mushrooms, and napa cabbage.