Six months ago, you had a beautiful picture of your friend’s cooking, and six months later, you were listing it on your idle fish for a low transfer price.
Yes, a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon, and two weeks later a tornado breaks out in Texas. Likewise, if you engage in the national cooking movement in the spring, chances are you’ll be faced with unexpected consequences in the fall: a temporary advancement in cooking and a return to the status quo ante, extra fat around the waist, and, possibly, a kitchen full of unused pots and pans and raw materials.
Don’t worry, you’re not alone – you’re not alone.
“Can you promise me you won’t buy anything from the house anymore? “
Maruko, 34 years old, coordinates Changsha.
My husband’s brow was furrowed with impatience as he said this.
It was a typical Sunday in October, and the KPI we had set for the day was to purge the house of expired or unused items – I could only blame the epidemic, and I wasn’t the only one who had gone on a shopping spree this spring with the national cooking frenzy.
Of course, it’s been a straightforward shopping expedition to sort out the unused crematorium.
The den, for example, which used to be my husband’s domain, is now crammed with two huge wine jars, one large and one small pickle jar, and the transformer-trailing, near-Tiffany blue beauty of a KA cooker.
They’ve all been lying in my shopping cart for a long time, until the epidemic shut us down and I finally had a good reason to convince my husband to agree to the order: the cooker can make bread for the family breakfast, and the pickles and plum wine are my mother’s specialties, which I’ll create unique flavors for my son when I’m ready to practice.
You know, men are creatures who can easily say no to their wives’ needs and concede everything when it comes to their sons.
Of course, they’ve come in handy, too. The cooking machine, for example, I used it to make Hokkaido bread, cake rolls, and later grounded meat buns and steamed buns; the jar of pickled peppers, pulled out and stir-fried for two meals, except the spiciness is a little touching, but everything else is perfect.
During that time, I became an active participant in my friends’ cooking competitions. Ribs and beans smothered in rolls, crème fraîche, and many other dishes that were already a blur in my memory, made the days of squatting at home a little less boring.
In order to facilitate procurement, I even bought a luxury reinforced aluminum alloy grocery cart, and once a week, rushing to the supermarket armed with weapons, the feeling of the grocery cart full, is also excellent.
Online purchasing is no less important. In addition to fresh vegetables, you can also buy seasonings online that are not usually available in supermarkets, such as hotpot soup base in Guizhou, Canton-style pot sauce, Japanese pork bone ramen soup, and so on – but there are many truths that only those who really cook will know. Humans, as animals, are prone to try new things out of curiosity, and then return to their old ways out of inertia.
So, after trying all sorts of weird and wonderful dishes, I returned to the world of scrambled tomatoes and eggs and small stir-fried meats. Most of those 10-pack, 2-pound bags of spices were used once and then retired.
As the epidemic improved and I returned to work, I retired more and more of the following.
High-powered meat grinder, for making stuffed buns and dumplings, bought and used no more than three times.
U.S. cast iron steak skillet, two pieces, divided into two versions with and without striations on the bottom, the former to be used once and the latter to be used twice.
Whisk, used N times during baking and 0 times after resuming work.
KA cooking machine as above.
Vacuum sealer, planned to make small dried meats, didn’t have time to unpack the box, resumed work, used 0 times.
The ingredients in the storeroom are also in the cold room. For example, Xinjiang flour for steamed buns, Ningbo water-milled glutinous rice flour for brown sugar patties, Hunan stalks of rice for rice cakes, and various kinds of salty butter.
I put them in places where they are not normally seen – how can we optimists who love life let this little thing affect our mood?
Of course, my heart wept when I threw away the expired food.
After a few months as a chef, I found that take-out still smells good!
Nini, age 25, coordinates Beijing
My co-workers still can’t understand that it costs me more than $600 for a single purchase at the supermarket.
“And it’s all food! “After that, she covered her mouth and laughed.
Because of the epidemic, after I returned to Beijing at the end of February, I didn’t order take-out or eat out for more than two consecutive months. At the height of the epidemic, I didn’t leave my neighborhood for three weeks and lived on food I ordered from the supermarket. I had the usual combination of meat and vegetables with each meal, braised pork ribs with dip and pickles, or chicken wings with cola and meatball soup.
Later, I was so craving for roast pork and hot pot that I bought a cost effective Bear bi-pot, which was very satisfying at 300 RMB. Because it is a one-person residence, so the dishes can be washed once to eat two fondue, barbecue meat the same way, cured meat once enough for me to eat two meals.
A lamb roll was 53 yuan, the hotpot base was 21 yuan, and every meal had to be accompanied by juice and fruit, which cost 600 yuan to purchase every two weeks, and so on.
After only two weeks of eating, and with the hassle of scrubbing pots and pans, I quickly put away the new wok and used the old wok for simple dishes like cheese and kimchi fried rice, rice wrapped in vegetables, and fried steak. It’s similar to a casserole dish and a bit like a cast iron skillet, so I was impressed.
The pot was bigger and heavier than I expected, and I heard that you have to use lard to cook, and you have to take care of it after using it, plus it was almost mid-April and I was tired of cooking.
I did the math, and even if I had to pay for pots and pans, I would have to spend two thousand dollars a month on ingredients alone, not counting the time I spent preparing each meal – an hour and a half for longer or an hour for shorter meals. In that moment, I realized the value of take-out and what it meant, and I didn’t set foot in the kitchen for another six months.
After failing to make toast, I lost my passion for baking.
Zijun, 36 years old, coordinates Hangzhou
In February and March, I was working from home all day long, a lot of time a day, except for 5:30 p.m. to start compiling the day’s work journal to give to the leadership, basically no work to do. Long days and long nights, I didn’t want to do anything else but catch up on dramas and brush up on short videos. Sometimes, the less you move, the less you want to move, and you spend every day glued to the couch.
One day, I saw a blogger making bread, so I thought of learning how to bake. I thought of learning how to bake, not only to pass the time, but also to add a skill. With little inner struggle, I bought a 40L oven online.
There’s a hitch, I bought it in March for over $800, but by 618, the price was reduced to $599, and the price hasn’t picked up since. Quite literally, I bought it when it was at its most expensive.
When the oven first arrived, I made taro bread once. Baking is really an easy way to pass the time, and taro mash is a pain in the ass to make. You have to wash it, steam it, and mash it. The mixing process is even more tedious, mainly for making toast. The dough has to be stretched in the form of a glove film, which means that the dough can be stretched into a film in your hand, but it won’t crack or break. This is a form of testing the elasticity of the noodles.
I’ve never kneaded the glove film once, but I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been exposed to steamed buns and pancake pies, and my technique is too vigorous and traditional. It was also because the dough and not good enough, the bread baked was very firm, not fluffy texture, and felt like a big steamed bun.
The first one was barely edible, and the second one was even harder, as if the whole loaf hadn’t risen. The second time, the whole bread was harder and felt like the whole dough didn’t rise. Then I asked my colleague who is a baking expert to tell me that toast looks easy, but it is actually a very difficult bread to make. She said if you want to continue to make toast, you can buy a chef’s machine and use it to mix the dough, so that the glove film will appear more easily.
I didn’t buy one because it was too expensive, and I had no interest in baking when I was able to go to work after the “ban” was lifted. Back in society, there were so many choices that cooking for yourself became even more difficult.
Now the oven sits alone in the cupboard, taking up a lot of space. It takes up a lot of space, and if you put it on sale, you can’t get the price, and the postage is expensive. The key is to consider what if… I mean, just in case my passion for baking returns, I can still get it out and use it.
Making cakes is really physical labor!
Changyu, age 27, coordinates Nanjing
While we’re on the subject, I went to Taobao and searched for my identical whisk for 69 yuan, which is 30 yuan cheaper than the one I bought in April.
I’m good 🙂
To be honest, during the epidemic, egg beaters are not easy to buy, I see Jingdong above, but also have to reserve in advance to rush to buy, the price is not cheap, I liked the egg beaters, Jingdong at that time to sell 109 yuan, a look at the bottom of the review, last year someone bought 49 yuan, instantly owed a traitor.
Like many people, during the worst spring of the epidemic, I was living in a rented room in Beijing.
At that time, rice cooker cakes were very popular and I wanted to try them. However, as a young man from the north, my equipment was relatively luxurious – I had my own oven, which gave me more room for imagination in food DIY.
The sine qua non for the cake was a whisk, but I couldn’t resist the urge to explore the food, so if it was more expensive, it was more expensive, and I placed a ruthless order.
The process of making the cake in the oven was a bit of a chore, I just remember the flour was everywhere in the kitchen, a small cake cost me 6 eggs, which is heartbreaking to think about. The recipe was looked up in the kitchen, but the talent was good, and the two-hour result looked good, comparable to the kind of birthday cake embryo texture sold outside.
However, since that time, the costly egg beater never reappeared, one is slowly and normally resume work, energy is not in the study of these food, one is more than delicious, two hours of the process is more torturous ah.
In fact, not only the egg beater, that period, I also unprecedented to buy a 5kg bag of flour, thinking very good, I can brand omelet, fried balls, do leek box, baozi. As it turned out, I got bored of the omelet after making it myself for two meals in a row, and never touched it again except for making a leek box once.
Why didn’t they move? It’s a tiring job!
Now, the only thing I can do is pray that the flour doesn’t get bugs, and, since I brought this up, and in the spirit of not wasting it, I decided to look into a few more pasta recipes to finish it off.
Carnivores don’t need fryers, they just want to sit back and enjoy it!
Yuan Yuan, 26 years old, coordinates Beijing
During the half month of home quarantine after returning to Beijing from my hometown, the first question I thought of every day was: what to eat today. The last question that came to my mind at night before I went to bed was: what will I eat tomorrow?
I was bored to a point where I started cleaning once a day, and I had never felt so truly happy about my work.
Until the national cooking craze saved me from my boredom.
I never thought, “Rabbit is so cute, how can you eat rabbit”, but just exchanged the equation [rabbit/chicken = meat, can eat].
I bought a Netflix air fryer, and while I was waiting for the delivery, I started researching recipes, and there’s a wealth of information on the Internet: salt crispy chicken nuggets, crispy fish fillets, air fries, burnt potato balls, etc., but none of this was on my radar. For a lazy person like me, who doesn’t need to work with complicated recipes, baked sweet potatoes and roast chicken are enough.
Thaw the chicken, make the sauce, marinate the flavor …… I had no idea that the short steps in the recipe would be so tedious, the marinade alone would take 8 hours (of course I couldn’t wait that long, just a few minutes), and then it was time for the air fryer to work.
I breathed out, and I was finally able to take a break. The morning went by just for a bite of grilled chicken.
In the end it tasted good, but it was so time-consuming that I’ve only baked sweet potatoes once since then in that same pan.
After the epidemic slowly subsided, the pan was completely unused. Now it’s lying quietly in the cupboard, and it’s only when I open the cupboard to look for something that I realize: Oh, I have an air fryer.
Perhaps, as with this fryer’s net position, the enthusiasm has passed.
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