Cooking and Eating Adventures While Self-isolating at the Residence Inn
One of the reasons why I wanted to stay at the Residence Inn with a full kitchen, was because I wanted to do my own cooking for the week. And the reason why I chose the Residence Inn San Francisco Airport/San Mateo, was because it had a full oven too!
So, the day after I arrived, after going down to San Jose for my 7-day pre-departure PCR test, I did some grocery shopping.
At Whole Foods, I did curbside pickup, which was a bit complicated because the Prime account is actually my mom’s account, and I didn’t have access to the app to tell them I was on my way and which parking spot I was in. But a staff member helped me out.
I also did pickup at Target, and that was very easy. You just show your order number through the window, and they open the trunk for you, and you electronically sign for the order.
Finally, I took advantage of the design of the Residence Inn to get doorstep delivery from Sprouts through Instacart.
Unfortunately, the Sprouts order had two minuses. One was that the whole reason I ordered from Sprouts, was because I was curious about the Miyoko’s Liquid Vegan Mozzarella. Apparently, it’s a liquid like a milkshake, which you pour onto the pizza. Then, in the oven, the “cheese” firms up. Only Sprouts carries it, and it showed in stock on the app, but the driver didn’t find it. Secondly, one of the bags of clementines had a completely smushed and rotten clementine in it. Thankfully, Sprouts refunded me, and they refunded not just the one bag but both bags of clementines!
Here was my order from Whole Foods:
By the time all of the shopping was done, I was quite hungry. It was too late to defrost the pizza dough from Whole Foods, so I baked the Stouffer’s mac and cheese in the oven for a late lunch. When else but a quarantine time would I have the chance to try such classic American icons as frozen Stouffer’s mac and cheese? It was my first time having it, and I guess it was okay?
I paired it with simply sautéed organic rainbow chard, for some balance.
I then had an even later dinner, with the pizza made with fresh pesto, yellow and red tomatoes, red onion, peppers, and regular pearl mozzarella that I got as a replacement for the liquid vegan one. Plus a side of clementines, blueberries, and a delicious pomelo I brought from home.
The next day, I experimented with the Impossible spicy sausage I got from Whole Foods, along with fried egg, and toasted baby boulé from Sprouts topped with Tillamook pepper jack cheese. I liked the Impossible ground beef - it really tasted like ground beef, and was far superior to the oddly smoky Beyond meat. And I liked the Impossible spicy sausage just as much. It is similarly greasy and savory as regular sausage (and probably not that much healthier, given the coconut oil which bumps up the juiciness but also the saturated fat).
I paired the heavy, open-faced breakfast sandwiches with pomelo and blueberries.
I really wanted to take advantage to eat as much fruit as possible, because I figured I would not be getting a lot of fruit in quarantine. And writing this 2 weeks into 3-week quarantine in China, I was right. There really is so little fruit in my diet now.
I finished my brunch off with some raspberry rugelach from Whole Foods. These are vegan. I actually looked for a non-vegan one, because I thought cream cheese was an essential ingredient in the crust, to make it tender and flaky? Whole Foods didn’t have any non-vegan ones. Well, these were okay; the flavor was good, but the texture was a bit too compacted and firm for me.
Another “food innovation” I wanted to try was the cauliflower crust for pizza. I’d made pizza crust out of cauliflower before in Spain, but I was curious to try a commercial version. This brand Caulipower boasts that it’s “America’s #1 Cauliflower Crust,” so I thought I’d give it a try!
I fried up some of the Impossible sausage…
…and topped with some pesto, broccoli, red onion, and green bell pepper.
It was a bit much to eat all of it in one sitting. I think 2/3 of a crust is an appropriate serving size. So how was America’s #1 Cauliflower Crust? Well, it’s basically like a huge cracker. The one I made myself was more bread-like. In fact, my roommate didn’t realize that it was made out of cauliflower!
I also had a Cara Cara orange to finish the meal.
Afterwards, I had a lemon and strawberry sparkling apple cider vinegar drink from Trader Joe’s, that my sister gave me. It was really good! It felt like a special occasion, so I used one of the Residence Inn’s special glasses.
Besides the Impossible sausage, I also wanted to try the Impossible chicken nuggets, which I’d heard were very good.
They indeed are! Maybe not as mind-blowing as the ones I had had in a vegetarian restaurant in Hangzhou, but good nonetheless. They had a kind of breadcrumb coating, and the texture was very accurate for a chicken nugget. Roasted broccoli made this meal more balanced.
As well as more fruit.
And it was all rounded off with toast topped with pepper jack cheese. Basically this week was all about eating whatever I wanted!
Some breakfasts, I had the Nature’s Path Flax Plus Maple Pecan Crunch cereal with Kirkland soy beverage I’d brought from San Diego. Sometimes there’s just something comforting about cold cereal.
With the pizza dough, I also made a calzone. I think one is able to fit in more “toppings” in the inside of a calzone! Here are the ingredients that went into mine: red onions, cherry tomatoes, rainbow chard, sausage, and mozzarella pearls.
In they all go…
Fold it up…
Tada! This was really good. I just love having an oven!
Another evening, I had a third of a cauliflower crust pizza and the last four Impossible chicken nuggets.
And roasted broccoli, one of my favorites.
One day for brunch, I had an Impossible sausage and tomato scramble, together with toast with pepper jack cheese. And clementines and blueberries.
And a great thing with cooking at the Residence Inn is that I could use the dishwasher to help out every now and then. I still hand washed a lot of things though, especially the cutting board, knife, and pan, because I needed them more often than I would run the dishwasher.
After my 2-day pre-departure double PCR tests, I felt a bit more free. As if I had just finished a test, without knowing the results, but just a relief to have completed the test.
So that evening I went to Falafelle, which I saw had very high ratings on DoorDash. I was driving up from San Jose and Sunnyvale, by way of Palo Alto, so I figured I’d drop by rather than use DoorDash.
Falafelle is set up perfectly for COVID-times. Basically you order in front of the door, and pick up from another window.
I ordered the “Falafelle Combo” ($12.95), and it was a beautiful cacophony of flavors, colors, and textures! The menu says that it comes with 6 falafel balls (but you can see they gave 7), with hummus, two dolma (stuffed grape leaves), tabbouleh, and toppings. The order taker just asked me directly, “everything on it?” so I just said yes! According to the menu, there were: “beets, sauerkraut, zesty cabbage, roasted red peppers, house salad, pickled turnips, sumac onions, pickled cucumbers, mild banana peppers, garbanzo beans.” I also added a “premium topping” of baba ghannouj for $1 more, as well as a pita for $1.25 more. Added all together, it wasn’t cheap, but everything tasted fresh, and the portion size could really feed two people.
Then the next morning, I made breakfast pizza with the ingredients from the Residence Inn complimentary breakfast, and the leftover ingredients in the fridge.
That evening, I really, really wanted to have Mexican food “one last time” before I left. I was already in the Target shopping center across the hallway from the Residence Inn, because I wanted to pick up last minute snacks and supplies, having recently found out that new policies meant I’d be facing three weeks of hotel quarantine, rather than two, in China. There was a Chipotle near the Target, so I placed a mobile order for a pollo asado burrito bowl, with a free side of queso blanco. The queso blanco was kind of heavy, and I have more joy with the kinds of Mexican-inspired salads that I might make sometimes at home in San Diego, but this still hit the spot.
I then had my very last piece of Williams-Sonoma peppermint bark, which my sister had given to me as a present. Waaah! (By this time, the candy cane pieces on top were a bit soft, but I still treasured these last bites!)
That very same evening, I still had to fit in the bookend to the Stouffer’s mac and cheese I had a the beginning of the week: a Marie Callender’s chicken pot pie. Another American staple that I’d never had before. I love chicken pot pie, so I was eager to try this version that a lot of people consider to be the gold standard.
It took a whole hour in the oven to bake this individuals serving. Was it worth it? Well, I’m not sure it was worth the 45% daily value of total fat and 75% daily value of saturated fat, that’s for sure! The crust was certainly flaky, but all that extra fat probably was because there was crust on the bottom, something that I don’t do when I make chicken pot pie (I only top the pie with crust). The chicken was not bad, and there were big chunks of carrots, along with peas and celery, just like on the box. But the sauce lacked oomph - maybe more onion, a splash of wine, maybe? It certainly needed a lot more pepper, which I could add liberally thanks to the pepper shaker provided by the Residence Inn.
All in all, I look back fondly at this week of cooking, baking, and a bit of takeout at the Residence Inn. I could eat what I wanted, whenever I wanted (and sometimes even had to overeat a bit to eat up everything I bought!). Writing this, in my last of three weeks of hotel quarantine in China, I feel so nostalgic for those days when I could eat my favorite foods, and really indulge for the last time in truly fresh vegetables and fruit!
