In this way, Liu Yunniang signed an employment contract with Su Qingluan.
Considering that Liu Yunniang still had to take care of her father, it would be best if she didn't leave for too long. Su Qingluan thought about it and discussed with Liu Yunniang: "Yunniang, do you cook often?"
Liu Yunniang nodded and said, "After Daddy got injured, Mom went out to earn money to support the family, and I cooked all the meals at home. Even before, I would help out."
"So how's your knife skills?"
"Knife skills?" Liu Yunniang was a little confused. "I don't usually care about knife skills. As long as the vegetables are cut, it's fine..." For ordinary people, many people are thankful to be able to eat their fill. Why would they have the extra energy to pursue "knife skills"?
Su Qingluan shook her head. "If you want this offal soup to be delicious, it's also very important to cook it at the right temperature." She pointed at the intestines, stomach, heart, liver, spleen, and lungs. "These offal have different thicknesses and textures. We need to cut them into uniform thickness and size."
Seeing Liu Yunniang's puzzled expression, Su Qingluan explained, "If the broth is too light, it won't remove the fishy smell. If it's too strong, it will be tough and difficult to swallow. Only when each piece of offal absorbs the broth at the same rate can the flavor of each piece in the pot of broth be uniform, rather than one bite being choking and the next tasteless."
Liu Yunniang nodded and said, "Qingluan, don't worry, I understand."
Slaughterhouses all have their own chopping blocks and cutting knives because customers often do not want a whole animal - especially sheep, pigs, and geese, but often want a part of it.
Su Qingluan has become familiar with the butchers in these slaughterhouses during this period - many of them are even regular customers at the offal stall. Whenever they meet, they tease Su Qingluan and ask her when she can make more offal so that they can eat to their heart's content.
Su Qingluan chatted for a few minutes, then took a knife and demonstrated to Liu Yunniang on a cutting board made of a tree trunk how big the offal of different kinds of animals should be cut, and used her hands to gesture the size and thickness of each offal.
"It might be a little confusing at first, but it will get better over time." Su Qingluan thought for a moment, "If you really can't remember, you can just write it down and put it aside for easy reference."
"I...but I'm not very good at writing..." Yunniang stammered.
Su Qingluan was stunned: She often wondered how to let her younger brother and sister read more books, and almost forgot that in this era, the so-called "basic education" was not popular at all, and the vast majority of ordinary people were illiterate.
She knew that she had no way to reverse the situation of the times, so she just nodded and said, "In that case, you should learn and remember slowly." It takes time to get the hang of a job.
As she spoke, she cut open a piece of washed pig lung. Yunniang felt that the young lady in front of her didn't seem to measure the size of each cut, but Su Qingluan cut a few times, and the pig lungs looked like they were cut from a mold, with the same height, length, width, fatness, thickness and thinness.
Such superb knife skills made Yunniang almost stunned.
Seeing her silly look, the butcher beside her jokingly said, "Is this your first time seeing this?"
Seeing that Liu Yunniang was still staring at Su Qingluan with her mouth slightly open, without blinking, and without any reaction, the butcher did not get angry. He just smiled and said, "You have to learn this kind of red case skills, little girl!"
Even if the butcher is not good at cooking, he has heard that it is rare to have such high knife skills, which can be used to do whatever one wants.
After Su Qingluan finished chopping a piece of pig lung, she looked up and saw Liu Yunniang staring at her blankly, as if her soul had been taken away. Su Qingluan quickly realized what was going on and soothed her, "Don't take my few skills too seriously. If you spend years in the kitchen practicing knife skills, you'll be able to master them in just three to five months."
She had no habit of hiding her skills from others, but that sentence was indeed more of a comfort to Yunniang - if knife skills could be fully mastered in three to five months, then many restaurants would probably not worry about whether the chef could stay.
However, what Su Qingluan said was not completely nonsense - if you concentrate on learning cooking for three to five months, you can indeed learn the basic knife skills, but if you want to go further after the "eight", every bit of progress will become increasingly difficult.
However, there was no need to explain the subtleties of this to Yunniang in too much detail - after all, the job of processing the offal only required patience and slowly cutting it into fixed sizes, and did not require extremely sophisticated knife skills. So in a sense, Su Qingluan had no need to worry about Liu Yunniang's "lack of knife skills".
So, Liu Yunniang's contract was completely based on "the more you work, the more you earn" - the Su family would pay her a fixed proportion of the sewage she cleaned.
After agreeing on the remuneration for every ten kilograms processed, Yunniang happily thought: If I work hard, I can at least earn enough to pay for my father's medical expenses!
So from that day on, Su Qingluan gradually formed a new three-party cooperation with the slaughterhouse and Yunniang -
Every morning, the butcher prepared various offal dishes. When the market opening drum sounded, the three members of the Su family entered the city. Yunniang waited for Su Qingluan to take her to the various offal stalls to "shop" and select fresh offal. Su Guangfu and his wife parted ways with their daughter and went to set up a stall to sell offal soup.
After selecting the fresh offal, Su Qingluan went back to the stall with her parents. At this time, Yunniang took the offal back to the small shabby house where she lived with her parents. She cleaned the offal thoroughly and cut it into small pieces of different sizes and thicknesses according to different requirements.
Before the Su family closed their stall, Yunniang collected the processed small pieces of offal and gave them to Su Qingluan again. Su Qingluan weighed them and calculated how much Yunniang would be paid that day based on the weight.
In this way, although it is a bit more troublesome, I can get an extra source of income and take care of my bedridden father at home conveniently. It can be said to kill two birds with one stone.
At the beginning, Yunniang was not proficient in cutting and could only cut two or three pounds of offal that met the requirements every day.
However, she is a serious person and willing to endure hardships. She seizes every opportunity to cut offal every day and uses the opportunity of cooking to hone her knife skills. So before long, she can cut more than ten or twenty kilograms of offal in half a day!
Xu Yunniang was very happy to see the copper coins she received every day.
This incident brought about an unexpected effect that surprised Su Qingluan and the Liu family: Liu Sheng, who was paralyzed in bed, had been depressed and blamed himself since he fell ill.
However, seeing his daughter cutting the waste every day, in order to share the housework, Liu Sheng forced himself to support his upper body and learned to help his daughter deal with the waste.
Because of working hard and exercising diligently every day, it actually promoted the recovery of Yagyu's lower limbs, which can be said to be a blessing in disguise.
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