Lockdown Day 9: A second gift from the neighborhood!

23,000 cases.

Today was an exciting day. First of all, I got together with a friend from the gym to do the Saturday partner workout. I normally skip Saturdays, because in general I don’t like partner workouts, where the two of you team up to complete the number of reps and rounds prescribed for the day. I feel like I will let down my partners! But somehow, moving the partner workouts of the day (WODs) online make them less threatening. First, you have the option to do it by yourself. Secondly, you can select your partner in advance. So this acquaintance posted that he was looking for a partner, but mentioned that he would be going slowly, and I felt like that was my speed!

We were about to get started with the workout, but he had a knock on his door. We all know when there’s a knock, you have to get it. He was given an antigen test to do. Soon after he finished twirling his nostrils with the swab, I also heard a knock on the door.

We got another delivery of groceries today! (Yes, the outside of my apartment looks very run down!!)

So there were 10 eggs to add to my collection, 3 big potatoes (quite caked with mud - I cleaned some off for the picture), two heads of iceberg lettuce, enoki mushrooms, a big celtuce 莴笋, a can of Spam-like luncheon meat (the label says that in includes Yunnan ham 云腿, so that’s kind of special), and a whole chicken!

My goodness, the chicken still had its head on - see its eye and beak?? What will I do??

So, unlike many other people in Shanghai who have a hard time getting food, and are cutting back on what they’re eating to things stretch longer, I am fortunate to have a fully stocked fridge. And I can’t even fit everything into my fridge!

Today’s 10 eggs need to wait outside for a while. Along with the tomatoes I bought a week and a half ago, and other vegetables that seem okay to store outside. The only thing that’s dwindling is my fruit supply.

The purple tomatoes weren’t in the best shape even when they arrived, I decided to cook something with them, along with the potatoes also from last time, which were sprouting. With the many eggs I have, I decided a tortilla de patatas would fit the bill.

This picture below shows the red onion - and the green shoots that came out the top!

They went into a pan with potatoes bubbling away in olive oil. I bought this pan specifically to make tortillas!

And here was my late lunch. Accompanied by a box of lemon green tea, from one of the quarantine hotels (they both gave iced tea). I’m so glad I took those with me, for times like this when there’s a limited supply of bottled water.

I chopped the last remaining bit of red bell pepper and stir fried them with the last remaining baby bok choy.

The tortilla de patatas came out really well this time. I think it was my best yet! I used 5 eggs and 2 potatoes, and a whole (smallish) red onion. And a clove of garlic which went into the oil with the potatoes, but I fished it out before I added them to the eggs.

What was great about it was that it had a pretty even texture throughout (I‘ve done it before where the top and bottom are well done and the middle is oddly runny and hollow). This wasn’t runny, but parts of the inside were still semi-liquid, which was how I like it, and overall it was very moist. And it was properly seasoned this time!

As great as all of the vegetables are, I wonder what people do when they need scallions, one of those essential ingredients in Chinese cooking? The scallions that I put into water not even a week ago have already grown so much!

After lunch, it was time to turn my attention to the chicken. It would need a lot of work. First order of business was to remove the head. It was so scary to see the eyes and then to cut right below the head to take it off, the eyes looking at you the whole time!

The other gruesome part were taking out the feet, which are tucked into the cavity above. The nails!! And the grotesque posture they are in. I was able to cut the five fingers off in one incision, saving the upper bone for stock.

There was stuff to clean on the inside too. Eventually I got the parts off. The breasts were so small - the little pile of scraps in the bottom right are what became of the breast meat!

Soon after (other people’s) lunchtime, pictures started getting posted in our entryway group. This lady made red-braised chicken legs and wings, and also egg scrambled with the leaves of the celtuce.

I told her thank you for the inspiration about the celtuce leaves, because I had not cooked with them before, so I didn’t know what to do with them. Soon after a whole bunch of other people chimed in with tips and recipes on how to prepare the leaves (salting before cooking seems to be an important step to remove bitterness!). I really appreciated everyone’s suggestions!

The other clue that I could do something with the celtuce leaves came from my neighbor across the way. She puts her vegetables on the window sill, and I saw that she had already separated the leaves from the stalk, and they were sitting in their own yellow colander.

Actually following her lead, I decided to wash the potatoes to free them of more dirt, and then let them sit outside to dry before storing them.

This evening, I was happy to roast a chicken thigh and two drumsticks, along with the extra stuffing I’d been saving in the freezer since Thanksgiving. Lockdown seems like a perfect occasion to finish it off!

I made a roasted cabbage slaw for later this week with about 2/3 of a head of cabbage, and with the remaining third I crisped it in the oven along with the turkey and stuffing.

Today we were actually waiting around all day to take our mandated city-wide PCR tests. Even at lunchtime I was wondering if I should make lunch or wait to get the PCR over with.

Well, around 5:30pm they said that we wouldn’t be doing the tests after all.

Then at 6:10pm they said that we had to keep waiting.

Then much later in the evening at 8:45pm neighbors started asking the entryway people if we were really going to be taking the test, because their kids needed to go to bed soon. The entryway leader said that she asked, and the kids could just go to sleep. So others were like, will we still do it? She said yes…

Then at 9:45pm she told us, we’re not doing the test after all.

Another volunteer explained, that there were problems all day with the new PCR test QR code that the city just implemented the day before, and that slowed down the process a lot. And the medical staff who were performing the tests in our neighborhood were from other provinces, and while Shanghai had a mandate for the entire city to do PCR tests today, the medical staff from the other province also had a mandate to return home the same day. So they had no choice but to postpone the tests, and tomorrow we would have Shanghai medical staff to come and do the tests.

My friend who lives on the other side of the building had been wanting to give me her chicken. She was so scared of the chicken with the head on, when she received it she immediately put it in a thick bag all the way in the back of her fridge. So she asked if I wanted it, and I said sure. Originally she was going to drop it off when she went down to do her test, but after our whole testing debacle came to a conclusion, she still came over to leave it in a bag on my door handle. She was waiting for her group order of vegetables to come anyway (I think it eventually came past 1am).

So it was another head to cut off, another pair of feet to cut out. This time I couldn’t get the toes off, so I just threw out the feet. I had already made chicken stock in my Xiaomi pot with the roasted bones from my chicken. I took those bones out, and added these in. Double strength chicken stock!

I’m so thankful for the generous deliveries of groceries… I’m actually not sure if it’s our sub-district level (街道), or our neighborhood committee (居委会) that’s responsible for these. I don’t think it’s our district level区, and my compound 小区 is actually kind of a motley group of buildings together that just happen to share the same two entrances, so we don’t have any professional management like the newer developments.

I see in my groups that other people are having a lot of problems buying things. Even group purchases are not going through. For example I actually signed up for bottled water through that Coca-Cola offer yesterday, through my neighborhood group, but it sounds like they did not have enough manpower to fulfill the orders so the group order did not go through.

Yesterday people said that the government secured supplies from companies and Jingdong was selling them, organized in this spreadsheet.

They even hosted the Chinese-style live-streaming programming, with the hosts telling people what was available. But you can see in the live comments at the bottom that things were already sold out. I tried to buy soy milk that I saw on their website (which, by the way, I placed an order through the regular JD website two weeks ago!) and it was out of stock already.