the first batch jiu niang in my fridge is getting increasingly sweeter. there's no sour taste but the carbonation has increased. the second batch jiu niang is also getting sweeter, i think in a few more days it'll catch up to the first batch. like that one, it too has increasing carbonation. instead of using the first batch, i used the second batch jiu niang to make my lunch today. i tried combination the two jars into one, but it kept bubbling that i was afraid it'd overflow so i split the portions again between two jars. i made fresh glutinous rice balls, this time making some pink ones as well using just a drop of red food coloring. it didn't look very pink initially, but it turned very pink once cooked. i cooked all of the rice balls, you can never get enough. traditionally they use beet juice to dye them pink. after boiling the rice balls, i scooped out some water before adding the jiu niang and egg.

in the afternoon i took a bike ride into chinatown. i didn't really need anything, maybe some century eggs for my instant pot century egg rice porridge i've been thinking about trying, and maybe some snacks. i basically just wanted the exercise because the weather today was so nice (50's). i wore by bilayer winter jackets but by the time i got into boston i'd unzipped them both and wished that i'd gone with something lighter. i go to ming's market because they typically have the cheaper price, but they don't have as much selection as nearby c-mart. usually i can only go to one, because it gets awkward carrying stuff i bought from one place into another, without them thinking i might've stolen them. so i either just go to one, or strategize, by only enough in one place to put in my small bag, save the heavy buying for the second place.

i returned home by 3:30pm, half an hour before sunset. i was panting so much, the inside was my facemask was dripping with sweat. i went outside to put the rain cover over my motorcycle and chatted with the mailman before coming back in.

i started watching spiderman: into the spiderverse last night on netflix and finished it today. that movie is so good. i went into it not knowing a whole lot, just that there was a new black teenage spiderman, but it turned out to be a lot more than that. the animation was in a fresh style i'd never seen, and there was so much details, it's worth a second watch. no wonder this film won the oscar for best animation feature.

i also watched some cyberpunk 2077 gameplay videos. i'd really love to play it but i don't want to invest in a new playstation. i could install bootcamp on my macbook pro, run the windows version of the game, but that involves clearing out at least 200GB worth of space on my hard drive. i wonder if OSX would allow me to boot into windows from an external drive? in the meantime, all i have are gameplay videos, where i can vicariously enjoy the game that way. it's amazing how cinematic it is, i'm almost afraid to watch it for fear of spoiling the storylines.

i did a search for "酒釀" on youtube to watch some chinese-language recipes for jiu niang. what's the secret of making it sweet? seems like everyone's got a recipe, no two are alike, but i wasn't any closer to finding out the scientific reasoning behind sour/sweet/alcoholic. a lot of recipes call for steaming the rice, but i don't know how much of a difference that'd make. i did find out on my own that 3 quart-sized wide-mouth mason jars can fit inside of the 8qt instant pot. that means i can do the jiu niang fermentation inside of the jars within the warmed inner pot itself. this will allow me to do experiments, like varying the amount of yeast powder to see if that'll make any difference.

i reheated the last of my risotto for dinner. i didn't heat it long enough (didn't want it to scorch) and the rice was only lukewarm. i ate sometime after 9pm while watching ant-man on youtube tv. i watched using the noise-cancelling headphones paired with the bluetooth transmitter because my upstairs neighbors were playing their tv noises too loud again, and i wasn't in the mood of drowning out their sounds by blasting the bose speaker.