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[ariadventures]

Tea Eggs!!

You know what I haven't written in a while? A cooking/food post! Someone asked me something on Twitter which got me thinking and I figured I'd finally write about making food again, so I'm pretty happy to have something to post on here again.

Immediately at the start of writing this I understand why recipes come with a background story, because cooking IS personal and at least, since I'm not a recipe blog, what investment do you really have in this if I'm not saying something about it? But I'll put the extraneous details after the recipe. This is far from a formal recipe and just a musing of what I did. I mostly did it to taste but these are some approximate measurements:

6-8 eggs 4 cups of water 4 bags black tea 3 tablespoons dark soy sauce 2 tablespoons regular soy sauce 1 tablespoon sugar 4 teaspoons salt 2 teaspoons Shaoxing wine 1 teaspoon five spice powder

Important to note: Make as many eggs as you want as long as it'll all fit in the marinade you make - it's gotta cover all of the eggs, no peekin' out. If you need less marinade, i.e. you're putting it in a tight ziplock bag, feel free to halve or otherwise divide the ingredients to fit.

Make the marinade in a saucepan with all the ingredients besides eggs. I started boiling the water and put the ingredients in one by one. I cut open the tea bags and dumped it all in. The five spice powder is out of convenience - if you look up all the spices included in it, like sichuan peppercorn and star anise and cinnamon etc., and have all of those on hand, you can use those as well, but this is a simple recipe for a simple person.

After mixed and boiling, let it cool off to the side.

Soft boil eggs in another pot, put them in an ice bath afterwards or run them under cold water for a few minutes, whatever your jam is.

Gently (GENTLY!!) use the back of a spoon or something to crack the eggshells while leaving them on, but not break through too much of the egg. The marinade is pretty strong so you could theoretically just completely peel them and soak them for a shorter amount of time, but I like to make them traditionally.

Put the eggs into the marinade and simmer/warm them for like, an hour. After that, let the marinade cool down again, cover it, and refrigerate it for up to 24 hours. That's it!

*Notes*

The dark soy sauce is mostly for the marbling/color of it. If you want a darker marbling, you can add more and reduce the salt. Like I mentioned, I did a lot of it kind of by vibes, so I added in a little more soy sauce and salt myself.

I had a test egg after I simmered them for an hour. Simmer? Warm? As long as it's not boiling, you don't actually want to thoroughly cook the eggs unless you're okay with super overboiled eggs. Tasted good, but did taste so much better after soaking for a day. I note soft boiled above because when you simmer them they do cook a bit again, and traditionally it is hard-boiled, but if you want them not overboiled you should do the soft boil initially.

As seen in the picture above, I marinated it in a saucepan overnight and put some clingwrap over it. My first attempt I only made 3 eggs, and they fit in a mason jar so I just put it all in a mason jar and used maybe half of that recipe above. If you don't want a big ole saucepan, you can also put the marinade in a big ziplock bag that'll stay securely tight. As long as the marinade is covering ALL of the egg!

This is what I mean by marbling! OBVIOUSLY these pictures aren't great (I have never claimed to be a photographer) but this is just to show what the end result should look like. Sometimes the marbling doesn't really come through but it still tastes nice!

I grew up with tea eggs always at the grocery store and able to grab 'em any time I wanted. They were usually always warmed in a crock pot as you grabbed them with tongs, but since I'm not running a crock pot for days as I finish eating them all I have them cold and they're still glorious. You can honestly marinade them 8-24 hours or so, I just like marinading for longer so the color really comes through and for more of the taste to soak in. Marinade them too long and I think they'll get too salty. It's a great subtle flavor, and you can reuse the marinade for another batch if you're making more in a short amount of time (refresh ingredients a lil that may have evaporated) or I know you can theoretically cook meat and vegetables in that marinade so you'll have something tasty from it.

I'm (AS USUAL, everyone moans) having culture feels and been wanting to cook more as a result. Most of it has manifested in veggie soup or varying noodle dishes, but tea eggs are near and dear to my heart and honestly I am so glad they were easier to make than I thought. I have a lot of weird vibes and euughh, trauma 🙄 over being in the kitchen just due to weird family stuff I grew up with so cooking is a real chore for me. Ultimately this uses two small pots (saucepans? pots? whatever they're called) and a tablespoon so the dishes to clean afterwards is minimal.

I really like the tea eggs and I really like that I can make them now, and I wanted to share that. I will probably fixate on them for a hot second! They've got such a nice flavor and my whole apartment smells good after. Let me know if you make any! Thanks for reading.

[ariadventures]

It’s distressing - no matter how many times I tell myself to keep stonewalling and not give an inch and stay quiet the rest of my visit, they’re still my family. And they’re still my parents. And it’s still my home. And I find myself slipping into old habits and scurrying around the house as usual, not pretending, but almost forgetting like I didn’t just want to die an hour ago because they don’t know how to treat me with basic human decency. They don’t treat me like a person, but like family, and family loves one another but sure as hell doesn’t treat each other well.

[ariadventures]

For the past three weeks my mom has scheduled an appointment a week and it’s always been “just talking” and checking in and now supposedly she’ll finally get new scans next week (even though she already has them!!!) but then she has to wait for those to come in too and I’m going crazy. Wasted weeks of her time for absolutely nothing. Hate the system

[ariadventures]

My personal posts have gone from on main, to drafts, to on side blog, to side blog drafts, and I think it is both cool and necessary to do that because girl nobody needs to read your sad posts >:(

[ariadventures]

I have fallen out of the habit of doing my nightly diary recordings. It stopped being daily last year, when I went back to Texas for the holidays and then had Charmed and then went back home again for CNY in the span of a month - travel exhaustion and too much to talk about while keeping quiet in my room made it difficult. I tried to keep it up since, sometimes with many days or weeks in between each recording, but I do worry it’s fallen off permanently.

Which may or may not be okay. I used to have three different apps - one for color coding my mood with tags of what I did that day (this was useful in figuring out my period was affecting mood greatly back then), one for three daily things I was grateful for, and then the recordings. I eventually fell off the other two because I no longer needed daily reminders to keep my head up and keep myself going, or to track specific bouts of anxiety.

Maybe this falling off is indicative I have outgrown it. It’s a little anxious in of itself, because it’s the last one left, and I think the most impactful. This coincides with a massive amount of anxiety and stress due to some other life factors, so it’s hard to tell whether a lot of my worries/anxieties could otherwise be soothed through talking it out in my recordings, or because it’s fallen off. I talk often about how I don’t have an internal monologue and how it can be hard to pinpoint what’s got me feeling bad - which is why talking to the recordings helped me so much. I don’t know what the specific answer in this case would be, and that also makes me anxious.

Back when I first started, I would do them as needed. As needed often meant multiple times a day, as I’d get stressed or upset and often vent to a recording or try to talk myself through it. I of course started growing and developed a lot of coping mechanisms so it didn’t have to be as often, and the daily factor was more of a holdover back from when I had to try and restrain myself to just doing one at the end of the night. Maybe it’s as needed, and it’s just less needed now. Though, knowing myself, I’m very avoidant and tend to stonewall things (which is kind of my specific problem and stressor these days). Which is to say, I’ll completely avoid a thing when it is making me worry or I’m bound to be anxious over it. It’s possible the time since I’ve done a recording is just weighing over my head and I’m avoidant to starting again.

I don’t know! I’m just posting to think things out still myself. This post is a lot more wordier I think in part because I’m going down the talky path I normally would in a recording, ironically. I don’t feel any closer to the answer, at the end of this post. But it felt nice to get it out.

[ariadventures]

When people in long term relationships say it feels taken for granted, or they lose their spark, I guess I can understand where they’re coming from. But often I think about the many times early on I cried out of gratitude and confusion, that someone would consider me and genuinely care about me, because the concept felt so alien to me. Internalizing that and accepting that for granted is one of the most comforting things in the world

[ariadventures]

I understand why my mom wants so hard for me to be in a relationship to the point of her immense pressure.

Cishet normatives and baby obsession aside (an admittedly big aside), she’s expressed wanting to make sure that I’m taken care of. In our vulnerable moments which are the few times we’re able to communicate a little of the hurt and fear we have for one another, she’s been so afraid that after she and my father pass, I won’t have anyone to watch over me. A part of her will always see me as a child because I will always be her child. And she doesn’t want me to be alone in life. And as an immigrant, she has internalized that the only people who will ever be there for you, understand you 100% are your partner and children.

There’s a lot of asides like I mentioned, like the obsession with passing down the family line, and the narrow view that only romantic relationships can be truly fulfilling, but otherwise - I get it. Spider notices I don’t respond to a question with yes/no and instead with an excuse and gently prods for my true feelings and response. Sarah exclaims ‘FINALLY!’ as I decide to buy muffins for myself (even though they weren’t on sale) because she says I decide to treat myself to something that makes me happy maybe 1 in 50 times she sees it. She sighs in exasperation after she tells me I should see a doctor and I respond ‘I’ll look into it’, because she knows the bad habit about me that means I never will. Spider decides to make dinner for me even after she’s worked all day, because she wants to cook something for me, and for a brief moment there’s just the dim lighting of the kitchen and us switching back and forth between discussion about silly porn game mechanics and our hurtful pasts and our future together. And it’s good. It’s so good. I get why she wants this for me and I know why she’s concerned.

I wish I could give it to her. I wish I could beam all the knowledge and feelings in my head about everything I have here to her so she’d know that I’m okay here. There’s so much to overcome about it it’s laughable. It’d be a difference of cultures. It’d be coming out about sexuality/orientation. It’d be coming out about my partner’s gender identity and it’d be coming out about my gender identity. It’d be having to explain the intricacies of poly and exactly how my relationship works. It’d be so many things that feel like the outright denial of her lifestyle. Sometimes I think about whether it’d be possible. Sometimes she shows a glimmer of understanding and compassion for others, and it makes me wonder if I could have that too.

When we had first moved here, our house was broken into and what very little we had was taken. She lost all of her family heirlooms that her mother’s mother’s mother’s mother had passed down over the ages. It’s an eternal secret - we could never tell my grandmother for fear of her health, and we never did. And sometimes I think the most compassionate thing I could do for her is do the same.

[ariadventures]

Every time I’m in Houston, I stop by an Asian bakery to bring back fun and fancy breads before I head to the airport. Our cashier was trans. On the drive home, my mother expressed surprise, and then a moment of silence before her next carefully worded sentence. “In this world, people take different paths to reach their own happiness.” Sometimes I think she’s close to understanding it and it gives me false hope

[ariadventures]

“You don’t understand! I’m calling you ugly and unlovable because I care about you!” 🙄 I do this to myself every holiday season blugh

[ariadventures]

Struck by the feeling that while there is an upper limit of good that people can be, the depths to which they can be shitty is unending 🙃

[ariadventures]

Don’t be like me and wonder “damn, why do I feel so shitty today” when you know DAMN WELL that the 15 minute call you had where your mother unearthed deep insecurities and brought you to tears in record time earlier this evening is exactly why

[ariadventures]

My instinct when I run into something I’m not sure about is still to ask my parents, which obviously sucks. Clearly I still want a relationship with them, and they still want a relationship with me, but instead of compromising or communicating about it, they make it unsafe to rely on them and expect me to change unrealistically to their preferences. It makes facing certain issues in life difficult and isolating, going into them alone. Which obviously sucks.

[ariadventures]

Cannot stress enough to simply do things that work for you. Even though I feel like I do a better job of it these days I still get caught up on shoulds. The smallest thing - yogurt. Healthy in theory and yummy. I’ve bought the healthy brand a ton of times only to let it eventually expire. Gave up and bought the brand I used to eat when I was younger. Less healthy probably, but now I’m actually eating it and it gives me the boost of blood sugar to make me feel like I’m not dying in the morning. Hooray!

[ariadventures]

This time of year always makes me a bit melancholic and reserved. By all means I love the weather as it begins to cool off, and I love that it gets dark earlier. I don’t think it’s seasonal affective sads- I think it’s just historically been a rougher period for me so I must associate it that way.

[ariadventures]

Realizations about myself I just had today! I stock my pantry and fridge for a younger me, but not for myself. I’ve got cereals, hooray! But I tend towards salty breakfasts, if any. I have snacks I always wanted as a kid that are past expiration date. I have all these untouched ice cream pints in the freezer that I feel bad about sometimes, and rarely break out. Sometimes I remind myself that I can indulge in dessert when Spider’s over on date night and we share some together.

But kid me would’ve been jumping for joy to open the freezer and see ice cream sandwiches, popsicles, and three different kinds of ice cream all as available choices. I still smile myself sometimes when I open it, even if I don’t partake. It’s like a little nudge to my younger self.

But there are these quirks and facets of my personality that I find are actually ways I’m still healing. It’s simultaneously a reminder that I’m not as far along in the process of healing that I think I am, but also a sweet note that I’m working on myself even when I don’t realize it. Anyway, just a very sweet thought I had earlier. I reminded myself that I bought desserts (again) even though I had some in the freezer I hadn’t touched since I bought those, and when I opened it a small part of me (inner child) got super super excited! And that’s when I sort of came to the revelation. I had an ice cream sandwich. Very exciting stuff.

[ariadventures]

Sleep paralysis dream- it crawled up my bed and on top of me. Elbows by my head and face to face. Kept my eyes closed because I didn’t need to see it at that point to know he was there. Not a menacing one just wanted to look at me. (Maybe hypno potential story?)

[ariadventures]

Spider said I was an avoidant person (not a bad thing, based on what I was describing to them I totally am) and it got me thinking! What I had described to her was that I don’t actually have as many social anxieties of having to make phone calls or doing things alone in public, or meeting people that a lot of introverts do - but that I get nervous when people try to know me. Random interaction at the store, sharing a table in a crowded restaurant with someone? Sure. Having to establish connection beyond that? Meh.

So it does occur to me that I haven’t really been particularly ambivalent when it comes to community and people these days, it’s just back then it was all meeting new people and casual interactions, but when it gets to people knowing my name and thinking they know me based off of what I write, I withdraw a bit. To be clear, I did used to have the stranger social anxiety before, so I’ve definitely grown and gotten a lot more comfortable with myself which is a good thing. Not sure if I was always this avoidant though. I know I definitely did have a big change a few years ago, during/after my moving out stage of life and the subsequent pandemic. Maybe it was then.

Am I still an introvert, or just avoidant? Haha. Funny that someone so into journaling and blogging about their personal life extensively should feel uncomfortable about being known. I’m also intrigued because I used to identify a lot more with an anxious style of attachment. Well, I was always a mix of anxious-avoidant. Also as I feel more secure in my interpersonal relationships and my self-worth, I am just a lot more selective about who I choose to share my time and energy with. Which is still also, ultimately a good thing.