N95 Mask Pau? Quarantined Chinese Folks Cook Creative COVID-19-Themed Meals

The COVID-19 outbreak, which reportedly originated from Wuhan, China, has been particularly tough on Chinese netizens. Most of them had to be quarantined at home, where even those who couldn’t boil an egg had to start figuring out their meal prep (food deliveries in particularly affected cities like Hubei are few and far between).

On Chinese social media platform Weibo, bored users started the trending hashtag #QuarantineDiaries as they document their lives at home on mandatory leave. Food photos dominated the posts, with netizens sharing home cooking tutorials and gushing about getting their hands on once commonly-available ingredients that became scarce during their city's lockdown.

One Weibo user uploaded a photo of a sweet potato, which she had bought from an online group buy spree that finally got delivered to her house. “I have not eaten this for over a month,” she wrote. “I was so touched [when I finally got to eat it] that I cried… and my tears flowed out from the corners of my mouth.”

Reganmian (‘Hot dry noodles’ in Chinese) is a Wuhan breakfast staple. It’s a basic bowl of dry noodles tossed with soy sauce, sesame paste, pickled vegetables, chopped garlic and chilli oil. A Chinese healthcare worker updated her Weibo log with photos of an ad hoc hot dry noodles assembly station at her hospital workplace, where she and her colleagues DIY-ed quick meals. She muses, “The virus has made us omnipotent. We mop the floors, clear the trash and also make our own hot dry noodles. I’m impressed.”

There are also quarantined netizens who cook up creative recipes with the free time on their hands. In response to the severe mask shortage, home cooks on Weibo made pancake ‘masks’ from scratch with just a few simple ingredients. One helpful user even uploaded a step-by-step guide to make the viral pancake masks. We have translated it below in case, uh, you wanna make your own.

The netizen stresses that sugar must be added, or the mask “won’t be nice to eat”.

“The egg yolk is added to give the mask a nice golden colour, and make it crispier,” explains the netizen.

Cover the dough with cling wrap and let it rest for half an hour.

Roll each individual small ball into a flat rectangle shape, and sprinkle some plain flour on it so it doesn’t stick to surfaces. The netizen adds, “Roll [the disc] thinner, as it will become thicker when you fold it into the shape of a mask.”

Pleat the ‘folds’ and add dough ‘straps’. Then poke 'stitches' along the edges of the mask with a fork or toothpick for extra realism. “But it’s okay if you don’t do it, ’cos [the holes don’t show up] after you cook it anyway,” says the netizen.

Netizen: “Why did I call it a single-use mask? Because it’s gone after I eat it hahaha.”

If surgical masks are too mainstream for you, there’s the N95 steamed mantou version.

There are also pancake masks flavoured with vegetable and fruit juices for variety.

Like these doughy bats, which the Weibo folks confidently claim “are definitely edible” (the novel coronavirus purportedly originated from people consuming infected wild bats).

Another netizen also concocted ‘COVID-19 meatballs’ by pushing enoki mushrooms into handmade minced beef balls to mimic the virus strain.

The end result looks horrifying, as it should be.

In a bid to eat healthily to boost their immune system, some folks also made fried ‘onion rings’ with cored apple slices. It actually looks pretty yummy, even if the deep-frying negates its nutritional value.

And of course, someone found a way to utilise all the used plastic bottles of cooking condiments — by making a gas mask.

PHOTOS: WEIBO