my father came with my mother to the cafe, despite it being his day off. he said he was going to baifu and chinatown for a supply run, saving us from having to do it later in the weekend. he fried some leftover pork fat to make cracklings before finally leaving.
my mother didn't think we'd be busy because we hardly had any customers for the first 2 hours. as we got closer to 1pm though, it suddenly got busy. even then it wasn't enough to put us over the daily average. it was an okay week but nothing noteworthy.
i kept trying to find time to make my japanese cheesecake. every time i tried to work on it, an order would come in and interrupt my recipe. i realize you really can't take on a complicated cook while at work. it'd be so much easier to work on it at home, without interrupts, with all my kitchen tools.
i finally got around to making the cake around 2pm. everything was going okay until i got to the egg white whipping part. i was using 4 eggs this time, so i had slightly more egg whites than yesterday. everything seemed okay. i cleaned the stainless steel mixing bowl with a combination of alcohol-vinegar-dishwashing liquid. everything was hospital-clean. i sprinkled some cream of tartar. the egg whites foamed up immediately when i mixed, so i poured in all the sugar. that turned out to be a mistake because the egg whites wouldn't foam after that. it turned white, but was soupy. the meringue had failed. i learned another important lesson: add the sugar gradually once the egg whites begin to foam. i tried to salvage the whites by adding more egg whites from yesterday, but that didn't help.
rubbing my forehead, trying to figure of a solution besides cracking 4 new eggs, thinking how i failed my 6th attempt at making japanese cheesecake. i went in search of answers online. i looked for "saving failed meringue" and found a potential answer. provided there was no grease contamination, i could heat up the egg whites and sugar in a double boiler (which i was just using to melt the butter-cream cheese-milk mixture), before beating into a meringue. i had nothing left to lose so i gave it a try. apparently this technique is called swiss meringue. i mixed with a hand mixer and noticed the egg whites and sugar was starting to foam up, a promising sign. i took the pot off the boiler and used the electric mixer to froth it up. to my surprise, i managed to beat the egg whites into soft peaks. so it seemed to have worked? but i had way more egg whites than i needed, so i only scooped out the equivalent of 4 eggs. the rest i froze, but in hindsight, i should've mixed everything together.
next came the folding, which was one of the things i did wrong yesterday. i tried to be as gentle as possible, don't know if i was doing it correctly. i then poured the mixture into the 7" springform cake pan, this time with a lower parchment paper collar. into the oven it went.
after an hour of baking, the cheesecake was ready. there was some light browning in the top, more than yesterday, but still not as dark as i'd hoped. it's a temperature issue, next time i should bake it longer at the higher temperature setting. although i noticed it browned gradually, and it didn't really get brown until later during the longer lower temperature phase. the cake also didn't seem as tall as yesterday. however it tasted the same, that same airy goodness. we (my mother, my father, my aunt, and myself) each had a slice, while my sister took the remaining two slices when she showed up with esmei right when we closed.
my day was just starting unfortunately. my father also brought back 7 heads of taiwanese cabbage from chinatown for making paocai. i could either come back sunday or monday to make the paocai, or stay after work and make it now. so i spent the next 4 hours making the pickled cabbage. i weighed the cabbage - they had a combined weight of 21.5 lbs. after i cored them, it dropped down to 20 lbs. exactly. shredding the cabbage took the longest time, as i prefer to do it by hand, gives a better texture. this cabbage wasn't the best, dense but also soft, not crispy like good cabbage, so hard to break apart. i ended up doing a lot of cutting just to make the work go faster. i salted it with 20 tbsp of salt then left it to reduce for an hour, mixing the cabbage intermittently. i also shredded a large carrot and left it to reduce with a tbsp of salt.
my mother was spying on me through the webcam and scared me when she talked to me through the camera, asking me how much long i was going to take. after an hour, i added 10 cups of sugar along with 10 cups of vinegar. i mixed all the ingredients then started to pack them into 32oz. containers. i loosely packed the vegetables, so towards the end i ran out of liquid and had to make a little more so all the vegetables could be submerged in sugar-vinegar solution.
it was almost 8pm by the time i left the cafe. my work was done and i didn't have to come back over the weekend. i ended up with 14 containers of paocai, which hopefully will last us for 2 months. the last batch i made was a little over a month ago, and we're already down to just 3 containers.
i came home with half a leftover shawarma from thursday, along with cherry-flavored puff pastry dough stick my 2nd aunt bought from the russian supermarket. i ate them immediately, i hadn't eaten anything all day.
at 9pm i caught the spurs-thunder game on amazon prime. earlier the knicks had beat the magic to advance to the NBA cup final. no team seems to be able to beat OKC with the exception of the spurs. wemby had been sidelined for 12 games because of a left calf strain, but this was his first game back with minute restriction. the team played him off the bench, saving his time for the second half when they needed him the most. no doubt the thunder are a great team, so it was very satisfying to see the spurs beat them and end their winning streak.
the breaking news tonight was a campus shooting at brown university. i believe this is the first mass shooting incident at an ivy league school. we still don't know the reasons why, with two victims dead and 8 others injured, some critical. the shooter is also still at large, and much of providence is under a shelter-in-place order.
i've started reading there is no antimemetics division by qntm (sam hughes) - a scifi horror about ideas that cloak themselves from detection by erasing themselves from victims memories. i read just the first chapter and i'm hooked. it's a pretty cool idea and has lots of possibilities.