Lockdown Day 21: Drama in the neighborhood!

This morning, I tried a new breakfast - congee! Last night, I put in about 1/8 of a cup of rice in the Xiaomi instant pot (1/4 of a cup using the cup that came with the machine, which is about 1/2 of a US cup), added water, and also mushrooms, and black soy beans. This morning, I topped with my two favorite toppings from office congee days: fermented tofu 豆腐乳 and salted olive vegetable 橄榄菜. Delicious and nutritious!

Today, PCR test happened in the morning. Around 10:50am. The time is always random, and we get hardly any notice that it’s going to happen.

This morning, I noticed something strange. My neighbor across the alleyway had her window closed. Usually she has it open, with her vegetables or other deliveries sitting on her windowsill to “air out.” Did she go somewhere?

For lunch, I had radiatori pasta, with my Chinese chive pesto, caramelized cabbage, and crunchy chipeas and parmesan to top.

I followed that up with a few mandarin oranges from the government delivery earlier in the week, since I noticed that one in the box was already moldy.

Later in the afternoon we got yet another delivery of vegetables! The third one from this supplier from Jiangsu province, which helpfully labels the contents.

Here's how the vegetables come.

While a lot of the vegetables were the same as the earlier two shipments, we did get a piece of ginger and two garlic cloves this time. And I was particularly excited about the eggplant, given that I had just thrown out four eggplants that cost $9 from Citysuper earlier in the week. The daikon on the right are missing their green parts, because I had to cut them off as they were already rancid.

Now, the picture above looks all nice and pretty. But the reality is that I have so many vegetables and food supplies now that I am even storing things on the floor! Here are the newest two daikon and cabbage with my three 5k bags of rice, black mu’er, and sugar on the floor, in front of my food shelves.

On the other side, I have the carrots, some of the potatoes, another daikon, and on the bottom shelf I have yet another daikon, sweet potatoes, and two more heads of cabbage.

And sitting elsewhere in my paella pan are yet more potatoes. You can see they’re starting to sprout, and some are getting a little wrinkly.

Sometime after the delivery, there was lots of shouting and fighting outside my window. Actually today, there was fighting in the streets all day, all around the community. We’re three weeks into the lockdown, and I think nerves are really fraying.

But the fighting outside my window - and the ensuing discussion in my entryway group chat - was interesting. It turns out that the building across the alleyway was sealed up by the government, because there was a positive case there. That’s why my neighbor’s window was closed earlier today! Except this afternoon I saw her raising or lowering some shopping bags through some kind of rope through her window. Based on the chat, it seems like maybe she had been lowering bags of trash to the street level, and when some people in the alleyway took issue with that, she fought back. Eventually, she exited her sealed building (the seal is paper), and went on a temper tantrum, hocking and spitting publicly seemingly on purpose.

Yikes, and eww!

Back to life inside my apartment, for dinner, I was inspired by a YouTuber who posted a video of stir-fried noodles, where he didn’t boil the noodles separately but rather steamed them over the vegetables cooking underneath. And then when they became softer, he directly mixed the noodles in. I decided to follow this technique, but kind of use the ingredients of japchae (except the noodles from my government delivery, rather than sweet potato noodles).

So I set up my noodles and main ingredients (napa cabbage, onion, mushrooms) in the Xiaomi instant pot, with the ingredients to add in after the pressure cooking was done in a separate bowl next to it (julienned carrots and Chinese chives). and went and did my workout of the day.

After the workout, I had some of the potato and carrot that I had in the oven roasting while I was working out.

And then my noodles were ready. They came out pretty well! But my noodles are so thin that they quickly became soggy, even though they weren’t soggy when the pressure cooking was finished.

Then we had yet another delivery around 10pm! I had just been talking to a friend in the United States, who was worried I didn’t have enough to eat. I assuaged her by telling her I had more than enough to eat, thanks to the practically too-frequent deliveries which came at random times all throughout the day. She said the government was like Birchbox, surprising us throughout the day to take our minds off of the lockdown. I like her positivity!

Well, this delivery wasn’t food, but rather daily goods. Interestingly, the Lux body wash, Clear shampoo, Omo detergent, and Zhonghua 中华 toothpaste are all Unilever brands. The Blue Moon bottle is laundry detergent too, and then we got Safeguard from P&G. It hit me now that actually these deliveries are the perfect way to sample on a mass scale! And you can probably also target specific neighborhoods, because I think the deliveries are organized on a sub-district level (街道).