Quarantine Diary Day 19: An Even Better Food Day!
Today’s food, I’d say, was even better than yesterday!
The morning’s breakfast followed the same formula as before, but the shapes (especially of the steamed buns) were even cuter!
Starchy vegetable of the day: steamed pumpkin.
Pair of mini pastries 1/2: oblong purple rice buns filled with sweet purple potato filling.
Pair of mini pastries 2/2: hollow buns. I wonder what it is that makes them brown? A certain grain? Or brown sugar? These are for filling yourself usually; I ate them with the following zhacai.
Pickled vegetables of the day: I think this was regular zhacai 榨菜 and pickled spicy green peppers.
Congee of the day: I think this wasn’t just rice, but also with pale beige things that looked like oatmeal. I ate this
Lunch had a couple new dishes.
Today’s shrimp was fried, I think, rather than the boiled version they’d served before. These were more dry and shrunken than the boiled ones.
I really liked this finely shredded pork, pressed tofu, and carrots. The knife skills is pretty good to make them such fine shreds, and notice the welcome lack of sauce! It was well seasoned just like that.
The leafy greens today were overcooked, unfortunately.
After lunch, I had more of my cherries and strawberries, which I’d been keeping in the mini-fridge in the room.
Every day I’ve been having coffee twice a day. I take half of the coffee in the capsule of instant coffee in the morning, and half in the afternoon. I mix it with room temperature water in the porcelain tea cup that’s part of the travel tea set my sister gave me. Today I had my coffee with one of my last Trader Joe’s mint creams.
Dinner was an absolute delight. It doesn’t look like much, but these four dishes are some of my favorites.
First off was the curry beef and potatoes. The potatoes could have been cooked a bit longer, and the beef could have been a bit more tender, but it was a fine dish overall.
I always find simple stir-fried napa cabbage to be very comforting.
Pork wrapped in tofu skin is one of my favorite dishes!
As is this typical Shanghaiese dish, lion’s head meatball 狮子头! Now, this wasn’t the luxury version filled with salted egg yolk, which I like to order from a fancy Shanghaiese restaurant for lunch delivery sometimes. But it was still delicious: soft but not too fatty, and coated with a slightly spicy and peppery dark sauce, which inspired me to add even more black pepper.
Today, they once again delivered dinner on the early side, around 5:45, so it wasn’t hot by the time I finished my meeting and tucked in. But every dish was a dish I looked forward to eating, and it gave me a lot of pleasure nonetheless!
