Quarantine Diary Day 12: Today's Magic Ingredient - Heat!

Today’s breakfast had something new, besides the oft-seen corn, sausage, and daily egg.

There was a red bean bread, surprisingly sweet but good. And it was a whole loaf! I ate two pieces for breakfast, and saved one piece for a snack later.

Then lunch came… a lot of shades of brown and orange.

The fish was ok. It wasn’t too hard to separate meat from bone.

The thick rice noodles were quite soggy.

The curry beef and potatoes had a good, noticeable curry flavor - this was surprising! We’d had a few yellow-colored dishes before, but they did not taste like curry. It still could have used more heat though. And the beef was quite chewy - the part that wasn’t bone, that is.

Cabbage was overcooked, like normal.

I was very happy for the orange. First, I like oranges more than apples and bananas, the two other fruit in rotation. And the oranges they have given have all been juicy and sweet, with a strong orange flavor.

Then for dinner, we had another surprise. It came piping hot! Now, I know sometimes getting lukewarm food is because I wait a while for the delivery guy to get out of the hallway before opening the door to bring in the food, or I can’t eat the food right away because I’m in a Zoom meeting. But I think that more often there’s a delay from when the food is cooked to when it’s delivered to the hotel, and then in turn delivered to our rooms.

So only on one occasion - the day we got our breakfasts two hours late - did the food arrive cold. But only on one previous occasion was the food hot. (And on that day, my flight’s WeChat group commented on that - one person reminded everyone to pick up their meals because the congee was actually hot that day!)

So this dinner was the second time that we got food really hot.

There was a bone-in chicken thigh with what I think is that “Irish” seasoning which I learned about from the Jianguo Hotel catering, thanks to their printed menu.

Then there was bok choy with tofu skin. Maybe because the food spent less time steaming inside of the to-go container in the journey from wok to room, the bok choy was was just that tiny bit less overcooked than usual - it had a bit of bite.

The chicken, mushrooms, and peanut dish was the chef’s typical dish of diced ingredients in gloopy sauce, but today this tasted pretty good, because it was not just temperature-hot but also spicy-hot.