Yang was stunned after hearing Su Qingluan's words. "It's so cold today, it's a good time to eat hot pot, but...what is rice soup hot pot? Rice soup as the soup base? Rice soup like porridge?"
"Almost!" Su Qingluan nodded, then shook her head, "But you can't use ordinary rice—here, I've bought it all!"
Yang looked at the large cloth bag of "rice" that Su Qingluan had bought. It looked like quite a lot, so she quickly took it and said, "Hey, if you want rice, just tell us directly. We have plenty at home. Why do you need to go out of your way to buy some?"
As soon as her hand touched the "rice bag", Yang realized something was wrong.
If rice is placed through a cloth bag or other soft material, it feels quite distinct. Even though it's not as round as beans, you can still feel it immediately.
However, this bag of "rice" feels very solid and smooth. When you grasp it with your fingers, it makes a slight "crunching" sound.
Yang looked at Su Qingluan suspiciously: "My dear, did you take the wrong grain and bring back someone else's white flour?"
Su Qingluan smiled and said, "Don't worry, mother, I didn't take the wrong thing. But this is indeed not ordinary rice. Otherwise, just like you said, we would have it ready at home."
"Then what are you doing...?" Yang looked at the bag in her hand with a puzzled look, removed the hemp rope that sealed the bag and looked inside: Wow, if you don't look carefully, you would really think it is a bag of flour!
"Is this...rice ground into powder?"
Su Qingluan nodded. "There's a rice flour mill in town. I thought if I go home and grind the rice flour, it would take at least half an hour longer. By that time, the soup base would be ready! Why bother going the long way and taking a more troublesome approach? Why not just buy the already-made ones? That way, we can save time and effort."
"You kid, you always want to spend this money!" Although she said this, Yang Shi didn't really mean to blame Su Qingluan. She just felt sorry for Su Qingluan because she couldn't save more of her own money to add to her dowry.
Su Qingluan didn't think so: "Mother, I make money because I want to live a better life, not to become a money-grubber and a slave to these yellow and white things!"
Yang nodded when she heard this: "Mother knows, that's the truth. Mother just feels sorry for you because it's not easy for you to make money."
"It's not difficult. I'm happy to spend money on our family!"
"You little girl, you're always so good at sweet-talking me!" Yang tapped the tip of Su Qingluan's nose and reached out to pick up all the food Su Qingluan had put on the ground. "Oh, you bought quite a lot!"
Su Qingluan nodded: "These are all to enhance the flavor of the soup base. The soup base of the rice soup hot pot originally has no flavor, but in the end, the flavors of the various ingredients will be absorbed into the rice soup, so it is also very good to drink this rice soup as porridge."
Upon hearing this, Yang smiled and joked, "So are we drinking porridge or eating hot pot?"
Su Qingluan was stunned and scratched her head: "So... count them all?" Anyway, in her previous life, she had a rice soup hot pot until the end, and the flavors of various ingredients in it were all absorbed. Add some other ingredients and some seasonings, and drink a bowl of delicious rice soup porridge, and it warms up from the stomach to the whole body!
Su Qingluan recalled the feeling of being warm all over, but the reality was that a cold wind blew in from outside the kitchen door that was wide open, blowing away all the warm fantasies about delicious food in Su Qingluan's mind!
She! Good! Hate!
This feeling of being forced back to reality from a beautiful dream is simply unbearable!
Thinking of this, Su Qingluan quickened her movements a little - after all, although rice soup hotpot does not require stir-frying the hotpot base like Sichuan beef hotpot, making this soup base is no simpler than Sichuan hotpot!
No! It's more troublesome!
Su Qingluan thought about it, turned to Yang and asked, "Mother, this soup base might be a little troublesome to make, so I'll leave the marinating of the meat to you, okay? Oh, by the way, when you marinate the meat today, don't be stingy with the seasonings. Marinate it for a long time, otherwise it will easily have a fishy smell."
Yang smiled and said, "It's nothing. Besides, there are still two pieces of the stove we built for boiling medicine. Let's put the pot on that stove today!"
Su Qingluan looked at the sky and said, "But mother, it's very cold today. Are we going to eat hot pot outside in the cold wind?"
"It's okay. There's something in our warehouse that can block the cold wind, but we have to wait until your father comes back. That thing was originally part of my dowry, and it was considered a good item. But now it's become a piece of junk at the bottom of the box. There are so many miscellaneous things piled on it, I can't clean it up by myself."
After talking for a long time, I still haven't explained what that "wind-proof artifact" is.
Although she was still a little curious, she had to make the soup base right away, so Su Qingluan put her gossipy thoughts aside and concentrated on the task at hand.
She first scooped out a large bowl of rice noodles, and slowly used cold water to mix the rice noodles into a very thin paste. And because rice noodles are different from wheat flour, the degree of water absorption and expansion and stickiness are a little worse, so as long as you are careful, it will not clump like "dumpling soup".
Of course, "small bumps" do exist, but this situation can be largely avoided by being careful.
While Su Qingluan was carefully preparing the rice milk, she sighed: It turns out that we can't just think about saving energy in everything.
According to the original steps for making rice soup hotpot, the rice should be soaked in water the night before. On the second day, when all the rice grains have absorbed the water and become moist and plump, they should be ground into rice slurry to make it fine and uniform.
Of course, in my previous life, the step of "grinding into rice slurry" did not require much effort. All I needed was a food blender, add rice, add water, cover the lid, press the switch, and it's done!
It takes less than five minutes to complete.
However, in this era, there are naturally no such convenient automated tools, and everything needs to be done manually. So Su Qingluan thought that if this step could be omitted, even the step of grinding rice flour, saving more than half an hour would definitely not be a joke.
Because now there is only a manual millstone, and the Su family does not have large animals to pull the millstone, only a handful of rice can be added to the millstone each time. How long will it take to grind it?
But now, the result of being lazy is that if she is not careful, the rice noodles will form tiny lumps due to uneven water absorption. She can only add cold water first to prevent the rice noodles from gelatinizing and expanding. The real time-consuming and laborious part is still to come.
On the other side, Yang opened the large and small paper bags or jars bought by Su Qingluan, and found that the ingredients were really diverse, and a considerable part of them were meat.
Looking at the piles of groundwater, freshwater fish, shrimp and mutton, Yang finally understood what her eldest daughter meant when she said, "Marinate it for a longer time or it will have a fishy smell."
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