Lockdown Day 25: Coffee to Tea
After a weekend of exhaustingly using up vegetables, I realized that I probably need to minimize my consumption of rice and noodles and bread, and focus on eating … vegetables! Let’s see what this new diet will bring.
Last night I put in the Xiaomi instant pot about 1 tablespoon of rice, and half of a small head of napa cabbage, enoki mushrooms, and maybe a quarter of a daikon radish cut up in small cubes. I set the timer to cook for about 30 minutes. Then after it finished cooking, I put in about a tablespoon of Korean doenjang (like miso). I think it came out ok. Maybe less soupy than I expected (I thought the cabbage and daikon would release more water). I’m going to try again tonight, and see about adding in different flavorings tomorrow.
About 10:40am I got the message to go downstairs immediately to do the PCR test. I was in a meeting with colleagues at the time, and they said, “Don’t go!” I think a lot of people now believe that getting a PCR test is the main way of getting COVID. After all, how is it that communities that have been locked down for a month now still get cases popping up now? One colleague told me that he just doesn’t go downstairs to do PCR tests nowadays. I’m just not sure what would happen if they found out I was skipping out on these… but I have the same concerns as others. I do double-mask with N95 and surgical mask, change into my “outside clothes” when doing the test, and change back and Lysol my shoes when I come back in.
Lunch was a platter and soup, composed of pre-made things. I had my braised Turkish green beans, roasted carrots, the avocado salsa, roasted eggplant, and roasted potatoes. And I turned last night’s unsuccessful caramelized cabbage, onion, mushroom and aquafaba mixture into a kind of soup, by heating it up with more water, and blending it with the immersion blender. It works!
After lunch, I had a nice tea time with mandarin oranges, the matcha almond cookie, and tea. The tea and tea set were both from my sister, who re-gifted a re-gift to me. It was my last day in the US, and i was hesitating whether to bring the tea set to China with me. I really hesitated whether or not to bring the set with me, because of space concerns. At first I was going to take just the tea set - it came in handy during hotel quarantine, to drink my instant coffee in! And then eventually I decided to take the two small tins of tea leaves, because the tins were small enough.
And now, I’ve pretty much run out of coffee (I have half of a single-serve cup of Saturnbird instant coffee left…) So I’ve started to drink the tea, which is a quite excellent red tea.
Thank goodness I overcame my hesitation and took the whole tea set!
I’ve actually just checked up the brand online (since I didn’t even really look at the label before). It only hit me, after watching a YouTube video about the brand that it was this fancy, luxury brand my colleagues had been telling me about! Wow - I liked it immediately when I drank it this afternoon, even without knowing how fancy this brand is. But now I’m even more in awe of this gift.
After the oranges and cookie, I guess I was still hungry and had one of my carrot and pineapple, whole wheat and millet muffins. They’re very tasty, surprisingly sweet (I think it’s the pineapple, because I already reduced the white sugar by half), on the more dense side perhaps because of the millet, the whole wheat flour, or the aquafaba, but I really like these.
This afternoon, I also had to do another antigen test. This time we had to write our last name and date on the picture we submitted to the group. It makes sense, but this new rule just kind of underscores how it really seems things are being made up as they go, and no one thought about a plan before rolling it out.
This evening, I did the upper-body workout of the day (preceded by another muffin “for energy”), and at the same time heated up a serving of shepherd’s pie.
Somehow it was a bit less tangy than when I tasted it the base straight out of the pot, but I still liked it.
I finished off dinner with one of the navel oranges that I’d been saving in the fridge.
Finally, I had to do yet another antigen test after midnight. Once again writing down my name and date on the picture. And this time the entryway lady gave the strangest instructions. First she said that one of the 大白 Baymax people came by to inspect our pictures, and said we all did a good job? And then she said that we have to save tonight’s pictures, and show the picture along with our testing QR code tomorrow at the PCR test. Huh? Now people in our WeChat group are starting to voice how they disagree with the policies, and how the people who come up with these policies are bone-headed.
