Lockdown Day 47: Ready-to-heat food from government deliveries
For a more filling breakfast today, I tried a congee with brown rice instead of white rice, cooked with lentils for an hour with some soy sauce and oyster sauce under pressure. It was very tasty! I still topped with the salted olive vegetable, but didn’t need any fermented tofu to put on top.
After getting a delivery of vegetables just yesterday022/5/16/lockdown-day-46-budae-jjigae-army-stew-and-th-end-is-in-sight-and-were-halfway-there, to my surprise, this morning we got another delivery. This one came in this gray reusable shopping bag with the Qiaojiazha 乔家栅 “founded 1909” branding on it, so I guess these foods are from this company. What I like is that this is a selection of fully cooked, ready-to-heat (or ready-to-eat) foods, perfect for busy days when i can’t cook!
Okay, there was yet another red sausage. This one’s fatter and looks like it has a casing, so maybe it’s different? I might still try this one rather than giving it away.
More appetizing was this package of smoked fish 熏鱼! One sees this a lot in nice Shanghaiese restaurants as an appetizer.
Also very Shanghaiese is this shaomai, with glutinous rice as a filling instead of meat like in dim sum restaurants. So it’s carbs wrapping carbs.
Then we got vegetable and mushroom buns…
…and meat buns. These will be so handy to pull out of the freezer for a quick meal!
Equally as exciting as the buns, is this package of seaweed peanuts 苔条花生。It’s so nice to get a snack - definitely not a “life necessity,” and more of a “luxury” these days! I’d recently been hankering for just something like peanuts, to make a quick peanut sauce, or to top some dishes.
Speaking of ready-to-heat meals, I heated up two zongzi 粽子 for lunch.
One of these was the other pork and chestnut zongzi in my pack of two. This one had two chestnuts instead of last Saturday’s one! Still only one piece of very chewy pork though.
I accompanied this with the leftover sweet and sour bok choy. Still very good eaten chilled.
After this, I was very full. I think zongzi are made with a lot of lard, and obviously a lot of glutinous rice, so it’s quite heavy. Still, I already heated the date zongzi, so I had that as well. It wasn’t as sweet as I would have liked…
Later in the afternoon, my friend asked me if I wanted yogurt. I said, I’ll give it a taste. She gave me four tubs! They look really good. I think I’ll try one for breakfast tomorrow morning.
I did my afternoon antigen test as usual.
For dinner, I reheated my rice and Sea Island Red Peas. Really very delicious! And I also used up the very last bok choy from Tramy’s outstanding delivery which included wonderfully fresh vegetables. Two weeks later, the bok choy felt just as fresh. Amazing!
After dinner, I had a big bowl of watermelon. I’m going to eat up this watermelon pretty quickly, I think.
This afternoon, entryway leader sent a message to everyone, kind of in a tizzy, saying that tomorrow morning we must use a certain brand’s antigen test, and then bring that test in a separate bag, one bag per person (rather than one bag per family) to PCR testing tomorrow. I didn’t have this brand (my latest bulk box of 25 tests is the “Flowflex” brand), and neither did most people, so entryway leader came by to give me a box. Just one test in the box. I asked, only one? She said it was just for tomorrow morning’s test, and after that we could use whatever brand we had at home. Umm, okay? Why this brand? Is it more accurate than other brands? If so, why do we still have the other brands? The random procedures never cease to perplex.
