Lockdown Day 35: Mastering fresh noodles, and a delightful holiday-themed delivery!

Back to work. Well, thank goodness it’s only a 2-day work week.

I toasted a carrot scone and made some coffee and evaporated milk (sweetened, for a treat!) for breakfast.

I have to say, I feel like I’m in a really good place with my food and fridge situation! No more vegetables outside, and no cucumbers falling out when open the fridge because it’s too packed. I have a lot of ingredients ready to eat or ready to cook. (The yellow bag on the second-to-bottom drawer is my big bag of bok choy.)

Today, I kept refining my technique with cooking the fresh noodles that the neighborhood government distributed on the May 1 holiday on Sunday. On Monday, I cooked the noodles as I reheated my kimchi jjigae, and that was a big mistake. They turned into mush, practically, because they were in the pot too long. Then when I made my ill-fated zhajiangmian 炸酱面, I think they were still too soft. Then yesterday I transformed the zhajiang topping into a pork-speckled version of vegetarian chili 素辣酱, and I was very intentional to cook it only 3 minutes. It was still kind of on the soft side. I then saw on the package that it recommends 2-3 minutes (somehow I had been thinking 3-4 minutes), So today, I made the same dish with leftovers, and I cooked it only 2 minutes. The noodles are really getting better and better!

Another trick that I’ve learned during this lockdown cooking experience, is that blanching the vegetables with a little bit of added oil helps keep the vegetables green. I saw that in a YouTube video, and I think the trick works!

After lunch, I had a bit more coffee with evaporated milk.

Then in the middle of a working session with my team, I heard carts rolling around outside, with some voices calling out to people. Could it be another delivery? Then, the entryway leader told us that we would be getting zongzi 粽子 soon! She must have been excited, because usually we get a delivery, she just tells us to come down right away. We only get a “warning” message to get prepared for something in the undetermined future when we do PCR tests. But in this case she told us to be on standby for the zongzi!

Soon enough, she told us to come down for them. What pretty boxes!

Zongzi are traditionally eaten during the Dragon Boat Festival (June 3 this year)… hopefully we are out of lockdown by then?? It’s really a very fancy gift box. My mom told me that this brand, Wu Fang Zhai 五芳斋 is very historic I read up and it was founded in 1921 in Jiading, Zhejiang province, and its known for being the zongzi maker.

We got 5 different flavors listed here, plus a box of 6 salted duck eggs.

I look forward to eating these soon!

After the excitement of the gift, and the end of my work day, I had an afternoon toasted scone.

And then took my afternoon antigen test.

Somehow I took a short nap, a bad idea for my sleep patterns because I ended up sleeping too long. But I guess getting up early to get ready for work made me kind of drowsy.

I woke up and prepared the ingredients for dinner: I was going to use up the last of the fresh noodles from the first opened package. I also cut up some Napa cabbage, red onions, Chinese sausage, and garlic, took some already-shredded carrots, and prepared mushrooms. With the noodles, I followed Kenji López-Alt’s recommendation to just blanch the noodles before draining them, in his recipe for stir-fried noodles. He said to wait just until the noodles got soft; I think he was using dried noodles, so for my already-soft fresh noodles, I just waited for the water to boil again after putting in the noodles, and drained them right away. Then I mixed with some oil to keep them separated.

For the sauce, I followed his ingredient list and (without measuring) put in soy sauce, rice wine, sesame oil, and white pepper powder.

I then did my workout of the day (posterior chain focused), and (after taking a long rest on my yoga blanket) then took a shower.

Then I fried up the different ingredients, starting with the sausage, then the Napa cabbage separately, then the carrots and onions, then the mushrooms separately, then added all of the cooked ingredients back in, with the garlic, then the noodles, and finally the sauce - first to coat the noodles, then I used my tongs to combine everything. So many steps! But I am very happy with how these stir-fried noodles came out. The noodles were a good texture - not overcooked -, and all of the different ingredients had their own flavor. I didn’t add any salt to the vegetables at all!

Finally I’ve gotten the hang of how to cook fresh noodles - really just blanching them for a few seconds is enough. It’s okay that some noodles are still opaque in the middle. I avoid rinsing noodles with tap water, because it’s Shanghai tap water, so the residual heat continues to fully cook the noodles.