Lockdown Day 17: Chinese Chive Pesto and other Ingredient Inventiveness
24,820 cases.
The day started out with a call to submit a rapid antigen result to our WeChat group. (I’m so glad I saved the little vial holders from the previous test kits - they really come in handy!)
I then had a lovely 2.5 hr Zoom call with my family. And it seemed perfectly timed because right after I was called down to do a PCR test. I hadn’t seen the messages telling us to go down, but rather one of the volunteers knocked on my door. This meant that I wasn’t one of the first in line this time, and had to get behind quite a few others. Still, our line went pretty quickly.
After the test, I packed up the caramelized cabbage. That huge head of cabbage that overfilled the Le Creuset without crushing with my hands, plus the onions and mushrooms, all collapsed into two containers!
For lunch, I decided to make a pasta with the pesto I made yesterday. I blended together a handful of raw Chinese chives 韭菜, with parmesan, olive oil, walnuts, and lemon juice. Today, I cooked it a bit in a sauté pan, before adding in the thin noodles from the neighborhood government.
I added on some roasted carrots (the other half of the carrot that I had used for the curtido yesterday), and crunchy chickpeas that were roasting while I was doing the PCR. And I topped it with some Parmesan crumbles (the chunk of Parmesan naturally got crumbly after being in the freezer).
This was so good! It actually tasted much like basil pesto, but the fragrance of basil was replaced by a more assertive vegetal garlic flavor. I loved this. It’s actually simpler to make than basil pesto because there are no cloves of garlic to be peeled. And Chinese chives can be found in much greater quantity than basil. I’ll definitely be making more of this!
Sometime in the afternoon, the talk of the community was a little vegetable stand that opened right outside of the gates. It seemed that it might solve the issue of needing to do group buys, but I myself am still overwhelmed with ingredients that I didn’t go check it out. Lots of people looked like they were heading in that direction, and from the pictures I saw in the group chat, there were a lot of people there waiting in line.
After a nap, I set off to make the jambalaya. For this, I used:
the medium grain rice that came with the first neighborhood government gift
a kind of seasoning mixture that I made, partly with the garlic parmesan powder from Costco, plus paprika, oregano, thyme, red pepper flakes
soy sauce and oyster sauce as stand-ins for the Kitchen Bouquet called for in the recipe
spicy sausage, which was one of the things I managed to buy at Aldi before the lockdown
onion, celery, and green bell pepper
shrimp, also one of the things I managed to get from Aldi
celtuce
and the chicken from the neighborhood government from last week.
I really wanted to use up my celtuce stem, so I added that into the mixture. It seemed to be a vegetable that wouldn’t release a lot of liquid, which is what I wanted.
The recipe I was using was from the New Orleans School of Cooking, where my sister and I attended a demonstration cooking class thirteen(!) years ago, and where I tasted a really delicious jambalaya. I’ve tried to use that recipe many times since then, but I’d never been able to follow it exactly, because I usually only have short grain brown rice, which takes a lot longer to cook. So the end result is always kind of mushy. In the recipe, you’re supposed to just put the rice into boiling water, and then remove from heat and let the residual heat cook the rice (with the lid on). That would work only with white rice, and I not only had white rice for once, I had medium grain rice, which is closer to the recipe too.
After the recipe’s 25 minutes of sitting were up, The rice did absorb all of the water, but it was still kind of hard in the middle. I stuck it in the oven for some more time… Now, the end result did get a bit more wet than I would have liked.
But it was still tasty. I fried up some shrimp that I had defrosted, adding on some of that garlic parmesan powder, and gave it to my friend who lives in the same building.
Tonight, there was yet another delivery from the neighborhood government. They once again gave us boxes of that cold medicine, which is so confusing because it’s supposed to be a treatment for COVID. We also got blue surgical masks (aren’t we supposed to wear N95s for Omicron?). And a huge bottle of dish/vegetable detergent. This really gives me the signal that they expect us to be here for several months, not the 7 days of the estimate that my community will be “free.”
The brand of the detergent is 白猫 White Cat, and the top of the pump is a cat head, haha!
I then did my gym’s workout of the day (core today), and after that I finally sat down to dinner. By now, the rice was a bit lukewarm, but it was still good. I fried more shrimp for myself just before, so that was plenty hot.
I then had one of the oranges from my fruit pack that I bought, as well as some of the pear that was from the same pack. A large part of the pear was bruised, but the rest was still delicious. This pear really exceeded my expectations for a pear. It’s watery and juicy like an Asian pear, but the flavor is this really delicate flavor, with initial notes of guava of all things. I’ll definitely seek this out in the future, after lockdown!
After dinner, I set out to do my US taxes, which are due… tomorrow! Expats get an automatic extension for filing, but we still have to pay the taxes we owe on time, which is kind of confusing.
Finally, I did my third COVID test of the day. But this one was a little different. Finally the entryway leader made it quite explicit to us, that for the night owls (or night cats 夜猫 in Chinese!), we could submit our pictures at midnight. While the early risers could do it first thing tomorrow. She had to submit her own report by 7am.
This new policy makes so much sense! And gives us a lot more control over our schedules.
It was another packed day, but I finally feel a bit more organized with the food situation, and in general feel less clutter in the apartment since i’ve finally been able to put some fruit in the fridge since it’s just that tad more empty, and some rearranging of items allowed me to take my vegetables and fruit that were on the floor onto a shelf.
