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after 24 hours, it was time to try out the tea eggs. peeling was easy enough, it didn't have the sticky shell problem i encountered last time. the marbling on the egg white wasn't as dark as i'd imagined, but how it tasted was the more important quality. i sliced the egg in half and tried it. it tasted a little bland, not nearly salty enough. so i added two more tablespoon of salt into the tea liquid, took out the eggs, put them into plastic 32oz. yogurt containers, soaked them with the brine solution, and put everything into the refrigerator.

it's kind of amazing how filling a single egg can be. despite it being just 78 calories, i wasn't hungry the rest of the day.

i got a chance to test out the zoom H1 paired with my canon 60D dslr. when i was in china i bought some flash brackets for mounting on tripods. i noticed the base can actually fit in a camera's hot shoe, but it didn't have a securing nut so it has to be used with caution. using a 1ft 3.5mm male-male cable, i connected the line out of the H1 to the mic in of the 60D. the H1 has to be turned on, and i set the camera's sound recording options to manual with the record level at 25%. i tried recording with both the in-camera mic and the H1 mic. surprisingly, the in-camera mic picks up some good sounds, just a bit fainter. the H1 - since it's directional - can really pick up the audio and the sound is louder. it's interesting but i wasn't that amazed by the H1 performance. i think i would've gotten the same results using any external microphone.

i tagged alone with my parents to market basket in the afternoon. my parents normally do supermarket supply runs in the mornings, so they were surprised by how empty market basket was in the afternoon. they bought a cart load of items and went to the cafe afterwards to everything off.

back in belmont, my father tried one of the tea eggs i brought along. like my taste test this morning, he said they were too bland. he said to add enough salt to the brine that you can't drink from it. if the tea is only a little salty, it's not enough. my parents told me to simmer again my tea eggs, this time adding more salt.

the ugly fruit we bought from market basket - though unusually fragrant on the outside - tasted sour on the inside. ugly fruits are not like the strange oranges i encountered in chongqing. though roughly the same size, ugly fruits are built more like grapefruits; the chongqing oranges are more like clementines.

back at home i resimmered my tea eggs. i added enough salt (3 tablespoons) this time to make the brine solution taste extra salty. originally i only wanted to simmer for 20 minutes but forgot about the eggs and left it on the stove for 50 minutes. afterwards i let the eggs soak in the solution overnight.