Chapter 60, Inn No. 60: Crab Stuffed with Orange
Seeing that Fang He's expression was fierce but her hands moved steadily, Yun Yin nodded in satisfaction and continued making the remaining dishes. When Yun Yin had almost finished the other dishes, Fang He held up the most perfect peony and said, "Miss Yun, how is this?"
"Okay, put it on the plate."
Upon hearing the praise, Fang He couldn't contain her joy. She tiptoed to the stove, placed the peony on the plate, and the dish instantly looked much better with the addition of the peony. She exclaimed, "Miss Yun, no wonder you said that plating is very important. With this arrangement, the dishes look much better."
Yunyin smiled and said, "Of course, that's why I'm letting you practice more."
Fang He nodded and said, "Yes, I will."
After serving the peony swallow's nest dish, the rest were pastries. This time, she made lotus flower pastries again. After a while, she switched to silver thread candy and honey three-cut pastries.
After the snacks were served, the fruit platter was brought up. Yunyin then brought up the chilled plum juice and jelly. This was a gift from her; she would always bring plum juice and jelly to customers who booked a banquet costing ten strings of cash.
If other customers want to drink plum juice, they can buy it separately. She made a lot and kept it chilled in the well.
Yunyin carried the plum juice back to the lobby and asked Huo Yu, "Mr. Huo, what do you think of today's dishes?"
Huo Yu put down his chopsticks, picked up the ice-cold plum juice, took a sip, and sighed, "It's so delicious, we ate very well. For ten strings of cash, we got such delicious food. It would cost a lot of money to eat such a meal in the city."
"It is a blessing for someone like me who loves to eat to meet Lady Yun in Long'an County."
Yunyin smiled and said, "It's my good fortune to have customers like you all."
"If you have any suggestions, please let me know."
After thinking for a moment, Huo Yu said, "Snacks are still too greasy for me. I'd like something lighter. Almond milk is delicious. I wonder if this snack can only be served at banquets, or if it can be purchased separately?"
Yunyin said, "All the dishes in the banquet can be ordered individually. However, for complicated dishes like roast duck, I need to prepare them in advance, so the portions will not be large. I have always sold almond milk separately, you may not have noticed before."
"Yes, I'll be changing the pastries you mentioned in a few days. You can try them then. However, the pastries will be on the sweeter side. I'll think about the less sweet ones."
Huo Chen pursed his lips and said, "I think the pastries my wife makes are delicious, whether it's shrimp dumplings or lotus flower pastries."
Yunyin was surprised that Huo Chen also liked sweets. She smiled and said, "It's good that you like them, but what Old Master Huo said is also true, they should be suitable for all ages."
After receiving Huo Yu and his son, the Mid-Autumn Festival arrived. Yunyin didn't take any orders today, but people started coming to deliver Mid-Autumn Festival gifts to her from the morning. She asked Zhang Lin to hang up the lanterns while she went to greet these people.
Besides the mutton that Luo Man gave her, Song Shi and Song Xuan also gave her some pastries, which were things they often ate. Yun Yin had seen them; they included poria cocos cake, osmanthus cake, and other pastries that Yun Yin didn't often make.
The people Xie Yan sent brought her crabs. Yunyin looked at the basket of crabs neatly arranged and raised her eyebrows, saying, "We can't eat the crabs we raise yet. Let's eat other people's crabs first."
Of course, Xia Xiaoniangzi also sent her flowers, as usual. Perhaps she felt that her place was too plain and needed some floral decoration, so she sent her quite a few flowers. Yunyin looked at the clusters of flowers and thought it was quite nice. She could use them to decorate the place and Xia Xiaoniangzi could enjoy them when she came over for dinner.
Yunyin also gave them gifts. In addition to the rare matsutake mushrooms, she also gave them mooncakes, bayberry wine, silver thread candy, and honey-glazed pastries.
These two kinds of pastries were originally intended for Xia Xiaoniangzi. However, since Fu Wang would be leaving after the Mid-Autumn Festival and she wanted to give some gifts to her friends, she decided to make them earlier.
Silver thread candy is actually dragon beard candy. Since the term "dragon beard" didn't exist at that time, Yunyin used its old name to avoid trouble. The ingredients for this candy aren't complicated, but it requires some skill. First, the sugar needs to be cooked. Pour the prepared maltose into a small pot and heat it over medium-low heat. Add a little rice vinegar to make it easier to pull into threads. Pour the cooked glutinous rice flour onto the work surface. Shape the slightly cooled sugar into circles, coat them with glutinous rice flour, and start pulling the sugar threads.
If you want thinner silver threads, just pull them many more times and you'll get silver threads as thin as hair. Yunyin shook the pulled silver threads to remove the excess cooked powder, cut the silver threads, and rolled them into balls. Yunyin put these balls of silver thread candy in a box and arranged for Zhang Lin to deliver them as gifts later.
She packed the remaining silver thread candy separately to give to Fu Wang when he left.
After making the silver thread candy, she continued to make honey three-cut pastries, which are also fried pastries. Huo Yu probably wouldn't like them, but for people who like sweets, honey three-cut pastries should be very much to their liking.
Honey-glazed pastry also requires a water-oil dough. Flour, water, and oil are mixed into a dough and set aside to rest. The shortcrust pastry is made by kneading maltose and flour into a dough and setting it aside to rest as well.
Roll out both the water-oil dough and the shortcrust pastry into rectangles. Moisten the shortcrust pastry with water and place the water-oil dough on top. Wrap the shortcrust pastry with the water-oil dough, flip it over, moisten it with water again, sprinkle with sesame seeds, roll it out slightly with a rolling pin, and then cut it vertically into rectangles of equal size.
Next, make three cuts. Be careful not to cut all the way through, and don't cut through the water-oil skin underneath. Pour the cut cubes into the oil and fry until golden brown, then remove and drain.
The oil temperature for frying honey-glazed three-piece cakes should not be too high. After frying, continue to make the syrup. Cook the sugar and water over low heat, add maltose and stir constantly until the bubbles become smaller. Then soak the drained honey-glazed three-piece cakes in the syrup.
After soaking for a while, take out the honey-glazed pastries, drain off the excess sugar, and let them cool before eating. Only with sufficient soaking time can you make honey-glazed pastries with a stringy texture.
Yunyin took a bite of the honey-glazed pastry. As soon as the crisp sound rang out, strands of sugar were pulled out from it. The sweetness of the maltose was mild and not cloying. The pastry was soaked in syrup, giving it a different texture from its appearance.
The aroma of sesame adds a unique crispness to this dessert. Enjoying a bite of honey-glazed pastry with a cup of tea during your leisure time is a perfect match.
After making these pastries, Yunyin began preparing for the Mid-Autumn Festival banquet. Later, Yunyin went to buy some oranges. The shopkeeper gave her some fragrant oranges, which are different from sweet oranges. Fragrant oranges have a very fragrant aroma, but they taste very sour and are definitely not suitable as fruit. Fortunately, Xie Yan gave her some crabs, so she planned to make crab-stuffed oranges. Eating crabs during the Mid-Autumn Festival is also very appropriate.
Cut off the top of the orange, scoop out the pulp, put in the extracted crab meat and roe, then pour in a spoonful of orange juice, cover with the cut-off top, and steam in a bowl containing wine and vinegar until cooked.
Steamed crab meat has no fishy smell at all. It tastes delicious whether eaten alone or dipped in vinegar or salt. The key to this dish is to use oranges, not sweet oranges. Sweet oranges taste strange after being heated. They taste bitter and are not tasty at all. However, if you use oranges, the aroma of the oranges will blend into the crab meat and neutralize the fishy smell, making it taste particularly delicious.
When Yunyin came out of the kitchen, she saw Fu Wang sitting in the yard doing carpentry. She stood there quietly watching for a while before going up to him and asking, "Are you building a doghouse?"
Fu Wang looked up and saw Yun Yin, then nodded and said, "Yes, I noticed that Hei Dou doesn't have a house in the yard, so I thought I'd build him one so he'd have a place to stay when he's on guard duty at night."
Black Bean squatted next to Fu Wang. When it heard him call its name, it barked twice and rubbed against him.
Fu Wang also patted its head and said, "It's worked hard guarding the house, watching over the cowshed during the day and the guesthouse at night. I'll reward it."
Yunyin's eyes softened, and she smiled gently, "Fu Wang, you're so kind. I've been so busy lately that I haven't had time to build a doghouse for it. I'm so glad you remembered."
Fu Wang shook his head and said, "I saw it running around in the yard today and thought of building it a house. There's some wood left over from making furniture, so building a wooden house for it won't be a problem."
Yunyin looked at the wooden house he had made and exclaimed, "Your craftsmanship is really good. It's so much better than the houses I made before." She blinked and said, "Could you make another one for me? I want to replace the doghouse in the cowshed too."
Fu Wang nodded and said, "No problem, I'll finish this one and then make one for you."
Yunyin: "Thank you very much. You should eat first, and then we'll continue cooking."
Yunyin brought the dishes to the hall and said to Zheng Guilan, "Go and call Cheng Yong and the others, as well as Luo Tian and the others. Let's all have a meal together today as a farewell dinner for them."
Zheng Guilan agreed and ran out to call for help. Fu Wang helped Yunyin bring the dishes to the table.
Since it was a family meal, Yunyin didn't make any complicated dishes. She simply cut up the eel and stir-fried it, and it tasted delicious. As for the fish that Fu Wang liked to eat, she also made it. He likes sweet food, so Yunyin simply made sweet and sour fish.
The mutton that Luo Man brought was stewed by Yun Yinqing. It was very delicious, and the mutton didn't have much of a gamey smell. Both the meat and the soup were tasty.
Yunyin brought over the steamed crab-stuffed oranges, one for each person, saying, "These crab-stuffed oranges should be eaten while they're hot, so you should all try some."
Cheng Yong came in from the courtyard and said to everyone, "I just went to the mountains and found that there's so much to eat here. Look what this is?"
Upon hearing the voice, Yunyin looked over, raised her eyebrows, and said, "You actually found the jujube tree. I didn't see it when I went into the mountains before."
Cheng Yong laughed and said, "Then you must not have gone in. This tree grows very deep inside. It took me a long time to find it."
The scientific name for the Japanese raisin tree is Hovenia dulcis. Because it grows in a twisted and crooked shape, people often call it the "crooked jujube." Japanese raisins that have been touched by frost taste very sweet. It's only mid-August now, so I don't know if they will taste sweet.
Is this fruit ripe?
Cheng Yong: "I picked them only when they were ripe. Don't worry, they're not bitter. I've already tasted them."
Yunyin took one and tasted it. It was indeed not astringent and tasted quite sweet. She asked, "How many jujubes are there? If there are many, I'll go pick some to make wine."
Cheng Yong sat down and said, "It's a pretty big tree, but there are still a lot of unripe ones. I only picked some of the ripe ones. If you want to use them to make wine, you should wait a while longer."
Feng Hai wasn't drawn to their conversation; he was captivated by the dishes on the table. Ever since he arrived at Yunyin's guesthouse, he had been amazed by her culinary skills many times. This time, she had only prepared simple home-style dishes, yet they still looked delicious and appealing.
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