Chapter 63, Inn No. 63: Tea Eggs and Pickled Eggs
Yunyin disagreed with Cheng Yong's words, saying, "Fu Wang still has many merits."
Cheng Yong smiled and said, "Oh, really?" He looked like he was watching a show, wanting to hear more of her opinion, but Yun Yin stopped talking after she finished speaking and went straight to the kitchen. "I'm going to make some tea eggs. You can have your milk tea first."
Recently, there have been a lot of people coming to Yunyin Restaurant to sell eggs. At this time of year, the eggs are all free-range and taste especially delicious. She buys all the eggs that come to sell. There are quite a lot of eggs in the storeroom. In addition to making some tea eggs and pickled eggs, she plans to make some preserved eggs as well.
Wash the eggs and let them air dry in a ventilated place. Wash and dry the jar for pickling the eggs as well. The method for pickling eggs is similar to that for pickling duck eggs. Use salt and mud to make a mud paste, put the dried eggs into the paste, coat them with a layer of mud, and put them into the jar to pickle.
She used to make salted duck eggs, but there are fewer people raising chickens than ducks in Long'an County, and her stock of salted duck eggs is almost empty. It's time to switch to chicken eggs.
Century eggs can also be made from chicken eggs. She took some wood ash from the stove, burned some buckwheat straw ash and cypress ash, and put them in a basin for later use. There were some broken tea leaves from the tea she had fried earlier, so she boiled them into tea soup and poured it into the wood ash basin. Then she poured in boiled salt water, mixed it into a mud, put the eggs in the mud to coat them, and finally coated them with a layer of rice husks. She put them in a jar and sealed the jar with yellow mud.
Yunyin spent the whole afternoon pickling these eggs. After putting the jarred eggs into the storeroom, she washed her hands and made tea eggs.
Place the washed eggs in cold water, add a little salt to make the eggshells less fragile, boil for a while to allow the egg white to solidify, then remove them and rinse them in cold water. Then tap the eggshells with a spoon to make them crack in a net-like pattern.
Yunyin put the cracked eggs into a bowl, returned to the stove to cook the sauce. She put star anise, cinnamon and peppercorns into the water, then added tea leaves. After bringing it to a boil over high heat, she turned to low heat, added soy sauce, salt and sugar to taste, put the eggs into the pot and simmered them over low heat. After cooking, she set the eggs aside to soak and absorb the flavor. She could then enjoy delicious tea eggs the next morning.
She put the tea eggs in the cupboard, locked the cupboard, and just then saw Feng Hai coming in from outside. She asked, "Brother Feng, what kind of dishes are you good at?"
Feng Hai sighed and said, "I only know how to order home-style dishes, which are far inferior to what you, Lady Yun, can do."
"Don't be so self-deprecating. How about you take charge of dinner tonight? I'd like to try your cooking."
Feng Hai nodded and said, "No problem, then I'll let you try my cooking tonight."
Yunyin let Feng Hai have the kitchen, and went to the side to help him, and also to see how he cooked.
Feng Hai first took the flour, poured it into the bowl and started kneading the dough. He kneaded the dough with great strength, and the dough he made was very chewy. Yunyin thought he was going to make noodles, but unexpectedly he went to the vegetable basket, picked out some vegetables, then shredded and pickled them, and wrapped the vegetables in dough.
Yunyin finally understood. It turned out that he wanted to make vegetable pancakes. He wrapped the pancakes, put them aside to rest, went to the well to fetch a piece of mutton, chopped it into pieces in a few quick movements, and put it in the water to boil.
She couldn't help at all; all she could do was watch the fire, watch him quickly cook the mutton, steam a bowl of eggplant, blanch some cowpeas, and finally cook a pot of winter melon soup, and that was it.
Although he didn't cook many kinds of dishes, the portions were very generous. Yunyin picked up her chopsticks, took a piece of eggplant, dipped it in the sauce, and tasted it. The taste was pretty good. The sauce was just right, with the garlic flavor blended perfectly. The eggplant was steamed until soft and then dipped in the sauce, making it especially good with rice.
As for mutton, needless to say, stewed mutton is also delicious. After being cooked until tender, it is dipped in ginger juice prepared by Feng Hai, which has a different taste from stewing.
Looking at the dishes on the table, Cheng Yong said in surprise, "How come these dishes taste like Feng Hai's cooking?"
Feng Hai took a bite of a pancake and said, "I made it. What, you don't want some?"
"I finally got a change of pace, and I don't want to eat yours again." Cheng Yong resignedly picked up a pancake, took a big bite, chewed it, and said, "It still tastes the same as before. Can't you make the pancake a little softer? It's really not a good experience for a patient like me."
Yunyin also tried the pancake, and it was indeed quite chewy. This was because he had kneaded the dough for a longer time, so it was chewier than ordinary pastries. She quite liked the texture, and she thought it would be very chewy if it were made into steamed buns.
The vegetables inside were also a good match, especially the pickled cabbage, which made your mouth water when you bit into it. Combined with the wheat flavor of the pancake, it was especially delicious. Yunyin praised, "Brother Feng's pancakes are really delicious."
“You won’t feel that way after you’ve eaten it for a while,” Cheng Yong said with a look of utter despair. “Miss Yun, you’re not going to have Old Cheng cook for us from now on, are you?”
Yunyin laughed and said, "No, I just wanted to see how good Brother Feng's cooking is. Later, I'd like him to be in charge of some of the dishes ordered by the customers. Of course, I'll pay him extra."
Cheng Yong glanced at Feng Hai and said to Yun Yin, "Okay, I'll agree on his behalf."
Yunyin smiled and looked at Feng Hai, "Brother Feng, what do you think?"
After finishing his pancake and taking a sip of water, Feng Hai said, "I'm fine, but there are some dishes you make that I don't know how to cook. How can I help you?"
Hearing his agreement, Yunyin breathed a sigh of relief and said, "Home-style dishes are very easy to make. You can learn them by watching me make them once. It's just a matter of paying a little attention to the heat and the proportion of seasonings. Brother Feng is a seasoned cook, so he should be able to master this quickly."
"You want to teach me how to cook?" Feng Haishen nodded. "Then I can't take your wages. This is a skill that can be passed down through generations."
Yunyin shook her head and said, "It's really nothing special, Brother Feng, you don't need to worry about it. You deserve your wages, so don't try to deny it to me."
In fact, Yunyin did not refuse to teach these cooking methods, but she noticed that people in this era seemed to care a lot about this. Whether it was Xia Yan in the past or Feng Hai now, they all had the same attitude, so she couldn't be too unconventional.
Perhaps she could do what she did before: use these cooking methods to exchange for things she could use. This way, she could both spread the delicious food and gain some practical benefits.
As the sun rose over the mountains in the early morning, Yunyin took out the tea eggs she had made the day before from the kitchen and placed them in the main hall. She served a bowl of porridge, and while drinking the hot porridge and eating the tea eggs, she remembered the pickled toon leaves she had prepared earlier and quickly put some on a plate on the table.
When Cheng Yong came in, he saw the porridge and eggs on the table. He sat down and ladled out a bowl, saying, "This millet porridge looks delicious." He took a sip of porridge and then a bite of toon sprouts, adding, "I didn't expect that pickled toon sprouts would taste so good with porridge."
Seeing that Cheng Yong also liked toon sprouts, Yunyin smiled and said, "They're also very fragrant when mixed with noodles." As she spoke, she caught a glimpse of Zheng Guilan and Fang He out of the corner of her eye and called to them, "Come and have breakfast."
The mother and daughter each served themselves a bowl of porridge and ate the fragrant tea eggs. After finishing one egg, Zheng Guilan exclaimed, "No wonder wealthy families love tea; it really is delicious."
Cheng Yong shook his head and said, "It tastes good because Lady Yun added spices. All the eggs in this pot together are not as expensive as the spices she added."
Yunyin: "Brother Cheng is right, that's true. But if you store this sauce properly, you can reuse it several times. So it's not that expensive in the end."
"Does Lady Yun want to sell this egg?"
“If someone wants to buy, I’ll sell it. It’s three coins a egg. Zhang Lin’s noodles can be sold with this egg.” Thinking of the food stall in front, Yunyin asked the others, “Zhang Lin told me yesterday that the food stall in front has too few varieties, and customers are tired of it and don’t like to come anymore. He wants to add more varieties. What kind of breakfast do you like to eat? Tell me so I can take a look.”
Zheng Guilan was the first to shake her head and said, "We are already considered to have a very good meal if we can have a bowl of vegetable porridge for breakfast. I really don't know what's so good about it."
After thinking for a moment, Cheng Yong said, "We usually eat flatbread, porridge, steamed buns, and noodles. I can't think of anything else right now."
“We can make wontons,” Feng Hai said from the side. “They’re easy to make, and Zhang Lin can manage by himself. We can help wrap the wontons, and he can cook them. Plus, we can use the broth we use to cook noodles.”
In Dazhao, wontons are dumplings, not the modern wontons with thin skins and lots of meat. They call any dumpling that is made by wrapping filling in dough and boiling it. Yunyin thought of sauerkraut dumplings, which can also be filled with straw mushrooms. She nodded and said, "Then let's make these. We've had a lot of straw mushrooms recently, so we can make some."
Yunyin looked at the people at the table and asked, "Where did Ma Hao go? Why didn't he come to eat?"
Cheng Yong slapped his forehead and said, "I forgot to tell you, I sent him back to Mianzhou. He'll be back in a couple of days. There are some things I need to tell the escort agency." Then he remembered something else and said, "By the way, Lady Yun, do you have any fodder prepared at your inn? If any guests need fodder, you should provide it here too."
Yunyin: "We definitely need to prepare a batch. The food stall didn't prepare any fodder before, but we still need to prepare some now. Brother Cheng, do you know which stall sells good fodder?"
"The fodder from Xiangjia Horse Farm in the county is quite good. They use alfalfa, supplemented with soybeans as concentrate, which is good fodder and the price is also reasonable. I can recommend them to you and ask them to give you a discount."
"Thank you very much, Brother Cheng. I'll go tomorrow and get everything ready as soon as possible. Maybe someone will need to stay here in a couple of days."
Yunyin's guesthouse has only been open for a short time. Although some traveling merchants stop by for a meal, no one actually stays there. Most of them are unaware that a guesthouse has opened, so they haven't decided to stay here. Others are unfamiliar with the guesthouse's details and are hesitant to stay there for fear of encountering a shady establishment.
There are actually quite a few shady shops in Dazhao. Yunyin had heard Fu Wang talk about them before, and Cheng Yong had also told her about their escort business not long ago, so she knew a bit about it. When traveling, you must be very careful, otherwise you will lose both your money and your life.
So Yunyin wasn't in a hurry. As long as the inn stayed open for a long time, word of mouth would spread and attract more and more people to visit.
She prepared everything and waited quietly. She had no debts and even had some savings. As long as someone came to order banquets every month, she could cover the costs of the inn. So Yunyin was very relaxed. Now that Feng Hai could also help her, she was becoming more and more at ease.
Author's note: Friends, I wish you all a happy holiday! [kissing emoji]
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