Lockdown Day 23: From beginning to end, a full day wall-to-wall with cooking

Already on Friday, I set today as the day when I would dedicate myself to cooking. I had just a mountain of vegetables that were sitting outside, even on my floor, because my fridge was completely full. I had a sense of being completely overwhelmed, and needed some degree of control over the situation.

I started the day off with an apple, one of the pieces of fruit that was sitting outside.

The neighborhood government has truly been supplying us with a lot of stuff. Just take toilet paper for example. The Vinda package on the right is one I bought right before lockdown started. Later, the government gave us the tube-less toilet paper on the bottom (a pack of 10). And then shortly afterwards, they gave us another pack of toilet paper, the Vinda package on the left.

Another pack of 10! (But of course, more is not more in toilet paper math: my pack of 8 rolls actually had more sheets - 1800, vs. the 1400 sheets in the 10-roll pack).

Now here’s the real problem. I had so many fruits and vegetables just sitting outside, because I had no more room inside of my fridge. Some of these I wouldn’t really store in the fridge anyway, like the onions or potatoes (though many were starting to sprout). But the mandarins were starting to rot and attract fruit flies (had to throw some out), the bottom of the eggplant was starting to go, you can see the heads of cabbage are in various stages of decay, the left-hand daikon was moldy and had to be thrown away, and the right-hand carrot was edible but very soft and bendy.

Of course, before I could really get started, we had to do a PCR test.

So my first order of business was lunch - I was pretty hungry by this time. I decided to make okonomiyaki, the Japanese pancake that uses a lot of cabbage. One of the ingredients is dashi, which I didn’t have, but I searched and searched my apartment and finally found the package of Korean pollock soup stock tea bags that I remembered I had bought at some point. This would give that sea brine flavor!

I ended up using about a quarter of a cabbage here, along with some red onion, and mushrooms. The sauce I made with a mixture of ketchup, oyster sauce, some sugar, and Chinese black vinegar - it worked really well! I also already had a small bottle of Kewpie mayonnaise - the real deal. Now I know why its nozzle is so small: so you can make pretty mayonnaise lines like this.

Then I wanted to use up some of the aquafaba I’d been storing. This is the liquid that’s left over after cooking chickpeas. I’d used this same water to cook up two batches of chickpeas, so hopefully it was sufficiently concentrated by now. I decided to make almond amaretti cookies, but with matcha powder instead of almond extract.

The aquafaba really does whip up from liquid to foam! I was really excited to see this, because it was my first time using this liquid. So this is why vegan bakers use this for meringues…

Then I mixed in this whipped aquafaba with the almond flour, sugar, and matcha.

I used double the aquafaba needed, so the cookies kind of spread out because they were so liquid-y, but they came out really well. I might try to dial back the sugar next time, but I did love the chewy quality.

Then I took a whole daikon and grated it with the box grater, and used the Woks of Life recipe for daikon radish pancakes. I was going to make luobo gao 萝卜糕 (savory radish cake), but I only have glutinous rice flour rather than regular rice flour. So this recipe was to make these pancake-like things. I thought they came out pretty well, and with the bits of Chinese sausage (thanks government gift), they really did taste like luobo gao, but fewer steps.

Then around 5:15, the entryway leader sent a message saying that we needed to do an antigen test and then submit it to the group before 6:30pm. Some people did it right away, and then she replied that they did it too early. Huh? Turns out we had to submit our results after 6pm, but before 6:30pm. Oh ok. This is just one of those things that makes one wonder - who is in charge? Is there a system? Why is everything at once so random, yet so fixed?

After the rapid test, I also made up another batch of my Chinese chive pesto. It’s even simpler to make than basil pesto! I used a whole bunch of Chinese chives, one lemon’s worth of juice, nuts (I just had a few walnuts left), and parmesan. And olive oil. I blended it all with my immersion blender, and put one container in the freezer, and the other in the fridge to use this week.

Then I set out to use up some carrot and celery. I decided to make lentil shepherd’s pie, which would also let me use up three potatoes for the mashed potato topping. I also got to use some of the milk from another government gift in the mashed potatoes, and I dumped the rest into the lentil base.

All set and ready to go for future meals!

I also lopped off the end of the eggplant that was starting to go bad and roasted the rest as meal prep.

Then I set my sights on another whole daikon. It’s so pretty when sliced! (I also used up the rest of the stalk of celery here).

I made another version of daikon radish pancakes, this time using a recipe from YouTuber Ajian 阿见. This didn’t involve grating the daikon, but rather slicing them as above, and then cutting the slices into matchsticks.

So yes, I made two versions of daikon radish pancake! The recipes were rather different. The Woks of Life pancakes (my misshapen ones on the right) were more like regular breakfast pancakes, with grated daikon added in. This was a simpler recipe, because you just added the daikon directly into the batter. Meanwhile, Ajian’s recipe (the ones on the left) were more like okonomiyaki, where the main ingredient is the daikon (and celery), and it was bound together by a little egg and flour. This one was more complicated though, because the cutting into matchsticks was more tedious. And then I had to salt the daikon, let it sit for 10 minutes, and the squeeze out as much water as possible. This makes the daikon flexible, but lets it maintain its crunch through the cooking process. While the daikon in the Woks of Life recipe melts into the batter.

I think I prefer the taste of the daikon radish pancakes on the left - with that crunch -, but they were both good.

This evening, I also fried up my three cucumbers. This was also a recipe I found on YouTube, from Chef Wang. He blanches the cucumbers and adds oil to the water, before stir-frying them! Yet another multi-step recipe, sigh. But I guess this reduces the time the cucumbers spend in the stir-frying step, and the oil helps them keep their color?

Finally, in preparation for an experimental cabbage-flour pizza crust, I cut up the rest of the cabbage from lunch’s okonomiyaki, and put it in a moderately hot oven of 250 F / 125 C.

And to not waste any drinking water, I used the same water that I used to blanch the cucumbers earlier in the day to cook the potatoes for the shepherd’s pie topping, and then used the same water to cook the lentils for the shepherd’s pie base. And then I drank that liquid kind of like a soup (it’s particularly dark because I added soy sauce to the lentils for flavor).