i left the house at 9am, rode the ebike to market basket. i needed a few ingredients for making my taiwanese paocai: a jug of white vinegar, some salt, some sugar. from there i went directly to belmont to borrow the car. days before i'd already loaded it up with all the necessary equipment: handtruck, shovel, buckets.
it was almost 10am when i got to the the cafe and called my sister. we were going to get free compost from the cambridge library. i needed her to come because each person is allowed 20 gallons, so together we can get a combined 40 gallons worth of compost. she insisted on bringing esmei even though there was barely any room in the car. esmei seemed unhappy riding in the back, unable to see above the dashboard.
when we got there, the compost pile already looked significantly reduced, since they started offering at 9am. but there was still plenty left for everyone. this was very good compost, unlike in past years. dark and properly reduced, with a fragrance smell reminiscent of mulch. it was so fresh, it was still smoking from active decomposition. i filled up my sister's 10 gallon bucket, follow by my own 5 gallon bucket, finally about 25 gallons of a 35 gallon bucket. a gallon of soil weighs about the same as a gallon of water, roughly 10 lbs. so you can imagine 25 gallons was super heavy and i needed my sister's help to lift it up onto the handtruck.
getting ready to leave, we bumped into my garden friend helen. she told me her midcambridge plant swap was in two weeks. i wouldn't have any seedlings to donate but i might be able to dig up a few plants from my parents' backyard, particularly lunaria, as well as some lily-of-the-valley and cascade hops. we pushed the compost back to the car. the large bucket was way to heavy to lift, so i portioned some out into smaller spare buckets.
we were about to leave when the car wouldn't start. from the sound it didn't seem like a dead starter, more likely a dead battery. it started fine early, why have an issue now? was it because i had the hazard lights on for 15 minutes? we tried to figure out a solution. we needed a jump starter, and there might be one at the cafe. it was 1-1/2 miles to the cafe - a little too far to get there by walking. it was a mile back to my house. i could run home - 10 minutes? - then bike to the cafe to grab the jump starter, then come back to the library.
my sister spotted a dog owner she knew and told him about our problem. he said he had some jumper cables then disappeared. my sister said she could try taking an uber back to the cafe to get her car, but it'd have to be an uber pets (because of esmei), and those are hard to come by.
while my sister went to DPW to ask if they had a jump starter, her dog owner friend pulled up next to the car with his jumper cables. i don't know the first thing about jump starting a car from another car, but this guy seemed to know what he was doing. after connecting the two batteries, he started his car, and a few minutes later i tried starting mine. viola! it worked. robert the dog owner was a real life saver.
we drove back to the cafe. while making a turn, one of the smaller buckets of compost toppled over in the back of the car, narrowly missing crushing esmei. my sister forced me to pull over so she could rearrange the buckets, but they were so difficult to reach, it hardly made a difference. i just had to make slow turns.
we didn't make it back to the cafe until 11:30am. after i unloaded all the compost and handtruck, i finally called my 2nd aunt. we were supposed to head down to chinatown around 10:30am, but now it was an hour later. after i picked her up we drove down to boston via storrow drive.
first stop was baifu/foodpak. not only did i need to buy some supplies, but i also needed to return a case of koon chun brand ground bean sauce (used in our beef noodle soup recipe). my father brought the wrong one last time, got the ground variety when he needed the ungrounded. i wanted to try a shortcut this time through fenway, but ended up getting lost and snaking my way through the northeastern campus before i finally got back onto mass ave. i don't think my 2nd aunt has ever been to baifu. it's not the sort of place you do normal grocery shopping anyway since everything is in bulk.
i got yellow pickled daikon, white miso soup stock, bags of rice, suancai, sesam oil, tonkatsu sauce, and a case of taiwanes noodles. i also found the bean sauce my father meant to get. it comes in 2 varieties: glass jars and tin can. glass jars are more expensive, but baifu doesn't seem to carry the canned version anymore, so we've been buying the jar type for about a year now. but just today i found cases of the canned bean sauce. it costs slightly more, but you get way more bean sauce compared to the jars. even after returning credit, i still ended up spending $450 on supplies.
nobody helped us load so i pushed the cart myself to the car. when i turned around i was surprised by one of the loading guys standing right behind me. he loaded everything into the car, i gave him a $2 tip. when i asked him his name, he didn't seem to understand.
next we went to ming's market. the parking lot was nearly full, and we had to wait for an empty shopping cart to become available before we could go inside. it was a mad house, lines so long it went into the aisles. as one of the last remaining asian supermarket in chinatown, this place can't sustain the amount of business after c-mart closed last month.
we bought a lot of vegetables, to get ready for next week when we open. my 2nd aunt used the $100 monthly grocery credit she gets through her health insurance to pay. her stuff was only $50, but she insisted on using her benefit to pay for the rest of the stuff, while i used a credit card to pay an additional $80 to cover the leftover amount.
my 2nd aunt wanted to stop by chinatown proper to get some takeout food, but i told her it was better if we went back. besides, we had frozen dumplings in the car and had to get it back to the cafe before they fully defrost.
we drove down berkeley street to get to storrow drive. barricades were already set up around the copley square area, i caught a quick glimpse of the finish line as we drove by boylston street. i dropped my 2nd aunt at her before returning to the cafe around 2:20pm.
i called my parents to ask them how to marinate the salt & pepper chicken, as we didn't have anymore left, and was hoping i could deep fry a batch before we reopen on tuesday. but they didn't want to deal with the hassle of explaining it to me, and my mother was actually annoyed that i wanted to help out, and said they'd marinate the chicken when they got back.
other than the chicken, i had plenty of other things to prepare. i made a new batch of tea eggs. i only simmered them in tea brine for an hour, since they'll steep for the next 3 days and get plenty of flavor that way. but my primary project was to make a new batch of taiwanese paocai. i bought 6 heads of taiwanese cabbage that weighed a total of 28 lbs., way too much cabbage. so i removed the large head but still had 22 lbs. worth. after coring them, i was down to 21 lbs., a more manageable amount. i didn't start making the paocai until 4pm. it'd take m 2 hours at least, so i won't finish until 6pm at the earliest.
the most tedious part was breaking apart the cabbage by hand. these cabbages were kind of expensive at $1.69/lbs, but they're pretty good quality, dense and crispy, and good color, no dead spots. after they've been broken up, i sprinkled 21 tbsp of salt and mixed the cabbage to reduce.
i had another 30 minutes to wait before i needed to mix the cabbage again, so i decided to return the car back to belmont and retrieve my ebike. i also moved all the compost except one 10 gallon bucket i'm leaving for my sister. i left at 5pm, came back half an hour later.
having not eaten anything all day, i made some geki spicy hot chicken instant noodles. i ate while watching some NBA playoff basketball (timberwolves-nuggets game).
at 6pm i started adding the vinegar and sugar after rinsing the reduced cabbage. 21 lbs. of cabbage meant 10-1/2 cups of sugar and 10-1/2 cups of vinegar. i also added the shredded carrots and some chopped thai chili peppers and a tablespoon of sichuan peppercorn. after mixing, i started scooping the paocai into quart containers. i ended up with a dozen containers, and 1 container of just leftover liquid my mother will use to pickle the cucumbers.
i didn't finish until after 7pm. i didn't get back home until 7:30pm. my day wasn't over yet. i still had to clean the weber grill which had been sitting outside since yesterday afternoon. the charcoal didn't completely burn to half, about half of it still remained. so i collected them, hoping i could reuse them for next time. i then dumped out the ash. i didn't bother washing the inside since i couldn't leave it outside to dry as it's going to rain tomorrow. so i dry cleaned it the best i could before putting the grill away in the basement.
i guess i was still hungry but i found myself involuntarily making dinner. i finished yesterday barbecue (just a kielbasa sausage and some smoked onions) before eating a bowl of pasta salad. i added a leftover tea egg, it was still pretty good.
i didn't do much the rest of the evening. surfing the web on the couch, i got really sleepy and wanted to go to bed early tonight, especially considering i didn't get a good night's sleep last night. but writing this blog entry took longer than i thought and now it's almost 1am. so much for early sleeping!