Quarantine Diary Day 13: From Highs to Lows

There is always a lot of packaging for our meals, but today’s breakfast was especially peculiar. One 油条 youtiao (crueller) in one bag, while the other youtiao together with the meat bun?

We often get meat buns, but the quality is especially low. Just a thin, dry, compacted disc inside.

Thankfully, the sweet potato is always good, and we got 豆浆 soymilk, not 豆奶 soymilk with added cream.

Lunch had a standout star.

Cauliflower was soggy as usual.

The fish - I think it’s belt fish 带鱼 - was okay.

Vegetables with a little bit of tofu skin almost looks like it was leftover from last night’s dinner.

The star of the meal was this typical Shanghaiese dish: braised pork belly with knots of tofu skin. The meat was tender (picked out the fat parts, though), the sauce was robust and flavorful, and the tofu knots were thin enough to pick up the flavors of the sauce, and were deeply satisfying. I added a ton of red pepper flakes to make it even better.

Dinner, on the other hand, made me really investigate how I can bring a camping stove and dehydrated meals “for next time.”

The main culprit was this. When I first saw it, I thought it was a piece of fish. But then I bit into it and came across big pieces of animal bone. I think it was pork, heavily breaded and fried, and then sauced so much to make it completely mush? There was no texture, so for a moment I thought it was processed like a sausage or minced pork inside, but then I remembered there were bones…

Someone in our flight WeChat group said it was 肉饼, a steamed egg and minced pork dish, but you could pick it up with chopsticks in one big piece, and there were big chunks of bone, so it couldn’t have been that. But this confusion shows how this food article was so ambiguously meat. Someone else commented “这饭真是越来越离谱了,” or, “The food is getting more and more ridiculous.” 离谱, or ridiculous, is a particularly colorful word that I learned not too long ago. Reliable is kaopu 靠谱; kao4 靠 meaning near, and pu3 谱, which is like a musical score or recipe. So it's like sticking to the script. Lipu 离谱, on the other hand, pairs that pu3 谱 word with li2 离, which means departing from or leaving. So literally, veering from the script or recipe. Going rogue, divorcing from reason,… I would agree!

I regretted eating most of this…