With oil and salt, especially plenty of salt, the food at home is much more flavorful!

Stir-fried dishes are more fragrant than boiled dishes. Their village has abundant water, and correspondingly, abundant fish. Families who know how to fish have a constant supply of fish all year round. The head of the household knows how to catch fish. In the past, they could only boil them, but now they can fry or stew them. They can even coat the small fish and shrimp in cornmeal batter and fry them! They are incredibly fragrant, no less delicious than meat!

On days when there's no meat, fish, or shrimp, just scoop a spoonful of pork into a stew, and the dish will instantly become incredibly delicious.

When the big fish are caught, the fish head is used to make soup, while the fish meat is kept, salted, and made into salted fish. A bowl of it can be steamed later when there is a shortage of vegetables.

Tonight's plan: steam a bowl of salted fish, stir-fry some eggs with chives, and stew some bok choy with a spoonful of lard.

Looking at the shallow layer of lard in the earthenware jar as she scooped it out, Zhao Lan sighed, "If only our family raised pigs, we'd have an endless supply of lard all year round."

Her lunch at the herbal medicine shop was not only oily, but also very oily, and the water was clearly separated from the solid food. Working hard was a must, but the food outside of work was incredibly good.

There was always a meat dish at lunchtime. Sometimes it was pork cracklings, sometimes cured meat, and sometimes sausage, stewed with vegetables. We ate them in rotation, and the portion of meat was quite generous, ensuring that everyone could eat at least three to five slices!

Even without meat, there will be eggs. Each person gets a fried egg, served with vegetables stir-fried in lard, which is also quite delicious.

She tries to eat as little meat as possible for dinner, saving it for the children at home. But sometimes she thinks how great it would be if they had a pig, a big, fat pig weighing over 200 pounds.

Keep the pork fat, pork lard, and pork fat to render lard. Ten or twenty pounds of lard is enough to feed a large family for a whole year!

Even if there's no meat to eat, we won't be afraid of lacking oil and fat.

"Don't worry, it'll be soon. The busy farming season is over, and we'll have some free time now. We can make mud bricks and build pigsties, right? We won't be able to eat them before the New Year, but we can probably eat them next autumn." Wang Guifen said happily as she ladled the stewed cabbage into a rough earthenware pot.

When the topic of pig farming came up, the three of them became visibly excited.

After discussing it for a while, they finally ate dinner to their satisfaction.

In the days that followed, as the winter slack season arrived, the people of Shanshui Village, who were usually very idle, are now still busy.

First of all, every household has someone working at the herbal medicine shop, so these people can't have any free time.

The dozen or so men who had been injured while selling rabbits were unable to work due to their wounds not having healed. The tasks of finding and cutting wood and moving stones on the mountain fell to the other men.

The old village chief's family was particularly busy in the village.

The men made adobe bricks, while the women leveled the land and dug foundations at the foot of their own mountain. In less than half a day, the villagers knew that they were building pigsties to raise pigs!

I also learned that the piglets were purchased from Shuiqing.

Immediately, every household was thrilled!

It's strange. In the past, when they were poor, they didn't think about anything else after farming well. The busy farming season was really hard and tiring, and the slack season was really leisurely. But ever since they started earning money by following Shuiqing, and seeing her raise chickens, ducks, geese, rabbits, sheep, pigs and so on, they also wanted to raise them.