Lockdown Day 16: Cooking the Entire Day
After the rain earlier in the week, the temperature dropped a lot, though today it was quite a beautiful day.
I had breakfast on my little balcony, which before this lockdown I had never really used before, besides hanging laundry.
I had one of the bananas that the San Diegan neighbor gave me, an orange, and toast with butter mixed with a parmesan garlic powder (to make garlic bread!), which I had bought from Costco.
Today was really spent cooking all day. From breakfast I was already in the kitchen until our PCR test past noon.
I love cooking as a hobby, but when you need to prepare every meal yourself, and every component of the meal, it gets tiring and all-consuming. Today, I was thinking Mexican, to switch things up, and to use up some some cilantro from several weeks earlier, and the avocado that I got last week. I decided to make tortillas myself. They’re not that complicated, but still involve mixing the dough up, flattening each tortilla, and then cooking each one.
Here’s my tortilla-making assembly line in my tiny kitchen workspace. Balls of dough are underneath the kitchen towel. I used my Le Creuset cast iron pan to flatten the balls of dough in between the Glad bag sides. Then I put the flattened tortilla in parchment paper, to freeze for later.
I was quite excited that 2 out of the 3 tortillas I made right away puffed up, as they’re supposed to! Of course, the recipe I followed from King Arthur Flour called for baking powder, so that might have something to do with it…
The two tortillas that puffed up were indeed nice and supple (the third one that didn’t puff up was just a little more stiff).
One of the other motivators for doing Mexican was to use up one of the heads of cabbage in pickled cabbage, “curtido.'“ This is what took up my whole morning. Because curtido uses raw vegetables, I had to be very careful about washing each leaf of cabbage. I actually used the Omo dish and vegetable detergent, which does include instructions to use for washing vegetables. I used a tiny drop of detergent for a salad spinner container full of water, and rinsed many times. And then did a final rinse with drinking water. Then I put the cabbage, onion, and carrots in a brine of water and vinegar, and just a bit of salt and oregano. I thought it came out quite nicely! (And I haven’t gotten upset stomach so far…)
Yesterday evening, I also soaked “kidney beans” in water, to cook with the Xiaomi instant pot today. I put kidney beans in quotes, because that’s what they are called on the label, but their color looks a lot more like brownish pinto beans, which is actually what I prefer over the deep red kidney beans that we know in the US.
I also made a kind of avocado salsa with lime juice, cilantro, and my newly opened bottle of New Mexico roasted green chile. I used the immersion blender to blend it into this salsa because the avocado was surprisingly unripe! I had thought I was racing to use up my avocados before they were overly ripe…
The last component was actually the easiest. Three eggs scrambled with the New Mexico roasted green chile. I had brought that huge and heavy glass bottle from Costco in San Diego, all the way to San Francisco, and then to Pudong, then to quarantine hotel #1, quarantine hotel #2, and then home. I was so excited to finally open this! I figured lockdown would be a perfect occasion to try it out.
It is indeed spicy, although it does have that specific cooked pepper taste which I’m not the biggest fan of. But I love it anyway!
All of that work for three tacos! (I also sprinkled some cheddar cheese on top). I love tacos so much - so I look forward to eating more with the leftovers in the coming days.
After lunch, I took a nap, but then it was back to using another whole head of cabbage. This one was much bigger, and I was going to caramelize it in my Le Creuset Dutch oven, along with some onion and mushrooms. I used up some of the mushrooms from yesterday actually, because they kind of looked like they were about to go bad sooner than the mushrooms I had received or bought earlier.
This is what it looks like after 3.5 hours in the oven! I’ll be using this in other recipes later…
I also prepared a kind of pesto made from chives 韭菜, to use in the coming days.
And also the start of mashed potatoes, using potatoes that were starting to turn green and sprout.
I was so exhausted from all of the cooking, that I could barely think about what to have for dinner. In the end, I used some of the potatoes to roast (kind of) in the toaster oven, with some of that garlic parmesan powder. And lots of fruit.
It was so refreshing to have so much fruit! The apple from my friend was very good, and the banana was still quite perfect despite becoming more black on the outside. And orange was still good too.
Before dinner, the entryway leader knocked on my door; she was distributing another gift from the neighborhood government, a pack of toilet tissue! Looks like I didn’t really need to buy that 10-pack the night before the lockdown.
Then some time later, the entryway leader told us to go downstairs to pick up more things. There was another 5kg bag of rice, this time short grain rice vs. medium grain like last time. We also got a third pack of thin noodles, and two packages of Chinese sausage, which I’m excited to try. I wouldn’t normally buy this, but since it’s given to me, I’m curious to test it out. It was actually an ingredient in that 莴笋叶菜饭 celtuce leaf vegetable rice that I made earlier , which I had replaced with a kind of ham.
Finally, there was not one but two tubes of toothpaste! Looks like one is kind of a normal one while the second is for sensitive teeth. I had just been thinking yesterday that I probably should start to be a little more parsimonious with my use of toothpaste, because I didn’t have that much left Though it’s not the Sensodyne that I normally use, as if reading my mind, the government gave me toothpaste!
Taking a break catching up with blogging, I had a stroopwafel cookie that I unearthed while looking for ingredients. This actually isn’t the stroopfwafel that I saved from my flight from San Diego to San Francisco in February. But rather the one I saved from my flight from San Diego to San Francisco in December 2020! It was still good…
So, today was truly a day where I spent almost every minute of it doing prepping and cooking. I hope it pays off in the coming weeks, when I’ll have more of a head start on preparing lunches and dinners. But boy am I exhausted today!
