Lockdown Day 5: Saving Water, and a Confusing "Gift" of Medicine
Today is the last day of a 4-day long weekend, on account of Qingming Festival 清明节. It overlapped with lockdown, so it’s actually been nice to have this holiday and not have to juggle online meetings with the PCR and antigen testing which all come about with little notice. Today was actually a very quiet day, since we didn’t have any testing to do today.
Outside, it also seemed particularly quiet. Even though we’ve been told to stay indoors, I’ve had a lot of neighbors, not from my building I don’t think, actually go outside for walks or to chat with other neighbor. But this morning the government announced more than 13,000 new cases which is a record in China, and in our compound 小区 there is one positive case. So maybe people were also being particularly careful.
I started the morning with a video chat with an old classmate of mine. I hadn’t heard from him in a while, but since the pandemic started in 2020, he reached out and started twice-a-year video chats to catch up. I actually really like these calls!
After that, I had some maple milk bread toast, and then set about cooking lunch. Here, you can see I am using a bunch of the slim bok choy 鸡毛菜 jimaocai (chicken hair vegetable, literally), onion (of which I have a lot of, and some look like they need to be used up), celery, red pepper (very expensive from Citysuper, US$3 for one bell pepper), garlic, vermicelli, TVP (Textured Vegetable Protein), shrimp from the neighborhood grocery bag, eggs, and seasoning. I wanted to make a kind of Singapore fried rice noodles, but with vermicelli and more vegetables.
Since the lockdown will last “until further notice,” I’ve started to be very conscientious about not wasting drinking water. For example, I try to cook pasta with as little water as possible, because I don’t want to use drinking water to boil the pasta only to dump it. So I used some water to soak the vermicelli noodles, and then I used the leftover water to hydrate the TVP, and also to cook the noodles in the pan. No waste of water!
I wanted to conserve my curry powder too, so the final dish didn’t end up as yellow as I would like. It also came out a bit salty, but overall I quite liked this. Full of vegetables, and enough for leftovers.
For dinner I had a bowl of the seafood chowder I made a couple days ago, with the shrimp from the grocery gift. I also used a piece of cod (from Costco), potato (also from the grocery gift), carrot, onion, celery, and some leftover frozen corn and the remaining half split of white wine that’s been in my fridge.
After dinner, I caught up with my old roommate from Spain. And then I made a banana bread with the two super-ripe bananas I had bought from before lockdown, 2 eggs, and almond flour (and a bit of coconut flour). It was handy to be able to whisk it all inside the immersion blender beaker!
I thought this banana bread came out very nicely - very light and just barely sweet. It doesn’t really come off as something without wheat flour.
At about 10pm, I heard knocking out in the hallway, so I prepared my mask. Soon enough the entryway leader ayi came by and gave me two boxes of medicine. I had read that we were supposed to get medicine, but I wasn’t sure why. I asked the ayi if we should just take it if we have any problems, and she said that we could take it right now, to better protect ourselves. So kind of like Airborne or Wellness Formula? The instructions say it’s to be used to treat COVID-19, so that’s kind of contradictory.
The ingredients say that the sachets contain forsythia, honeysuckle, ephedra(!), fried bitter almond, gypsum, isatis root, Dryopteris crassirhizoma (a type of fern), Houttuynia cordata, patchouli, rhubarb, rhodiola, menthol, and licorice.
There was a Q&A from the Shanghai government about how a lot of residents were getting this Traditional Chinese Medicine, and how good TCM was for COVID-19. But I guess I’m still not clear if we should be taking it to treat symptoms or if it should be used as a prophylactic?
Some neighbors have shared in our WeChat group chat that the medicine isn’t suitable for everyone, and that we should take it only when we have symptoms (in which case shouldn’t we be going to a hospital?). In fact that’s what written instructions indicate. So, it seems safer to not take it just yet…
