Lockdown Day 19: Yet another delivery, and starting to deal with food waste
This morning I had a bowl of sweet potato and rolled oats (and chia and flaxseed). I liked yesterday’s bowl, but the longer cooking time for steel cut oats made the sweet potato rather soft. To keep them firmer, I used rolled oats this time, for a shorter cooking time. I like this method better, although it was a bit dry.
For lunch, I reheated the jambalaya, again in the Xiaomi instant pot, and fried up a few of the big shrimp from Aldi. Again, since I have plenty of water now, I felt I could do a quick defrost of the shrimp in water!
I enjoyed my lunch outside again.
This afternoon, there was a lot of activity going on outside. Seemed like there would be another delivery coming…
I really feel for these building leaders and volunteers, who have to deliver all of these supplies to everyone. Here’s one delivering goods to the building across the alley, pulling things along using what looks like a makeshift cart with tiny wheels.
The delivery of the day was a 2.5kg box of mandarin oranges. I’m so happy that we get fruit, finally! And I tried one right away - sweet, juicy, and nicely tart in a way that a lot of mandarin oranges in China aren’t. I could say these are better than the ones I’ve bought myself!
We also got milk; I don’t really drink milk, but I could certainly use this for baking and cooking. Plus a packet of millet.
Sometime later, I heard a knock on the door. My neighbor across the way left a package of toilet paper on my doorknob. Wow, another delivery. A second pack of toilet paper. They must really think we’re going to be locked down for a while! I had just bought an identical pack of toilet tissue the night before lockdown…
For dinner, I cooked some rice, heated up the refried beans from this weekend, scrambled eggs with the jarred New Mexico green pepper, and topped with some of the curtido and avocado salsa.
Then looking through my fridge, I saw that the ends of the green beans I had bought from Citysuper, the really expensive expat-oriented supermarket in IAPM, were going moldy at the bottom. So I immediately made the Turkish braised green bean recipe in the Xiaomi instant pot, with the remainder of an onion and some tomatoes that were feeling really soft (or had split already). I didn’t follow a recipe exactly, but it’s basically the dish I tried for the first time at a cooking class in Istanbul.
Unfortunately, the eggplant I had been hoping to roast had all gone bad. Such a pity! Not only was I looking forward to roasted eggplant, these eggplants were very expensive - about US$9 for the two packs!
I know I just need to let this go, and not feel bad. But I do wish I could have paid more attention to these eggplants, rather than trying to find a way to use of the other groceries I seem to get in much greater quantity.
