Chapter 7
Lu Shiyu broke off the rabbit's head and four legs, scalded one side in boiling water, and then peeled off the skin. After removing the internal organs, the deformed rabbit was processed and turned into tender rabbit meat.
Cut the rabbit meat into evenly sized pieces. Soak the cuts in clean water sprinkled with salt for ten minutes, then scrub them clean to remove any blood clots. Place the rabbit meat in a pot with cold water, add two slices of ginger and the rabbit meat, and add two tablespoons of cooking wine to prevent the rabbit from developing a fishy smell.
When the water in the pot starts to boil, I squat beside the pot to skim off the foam. It only takes five minutes to blanch the rabbit meat. Then I can take it out of the pot and set it aside, and pour out the waste water.
After wiping the iron pan dry, pour in cooking oil. When the oil is hot, add garlic and ginger. Lu Shiyu reluctantly took out a few cloth bags, took out some peppercorns, bay leaves, and dried chilies and put them into the pot. The price of spices in the base is not low, and Lu Shiyu usually doesn't want to put more.
After the aroma comes out, pour the rabbit meat into the pot and stir-fry. Finally, add some light soy sauce, dark soy sauce, salt and sugar. Considering environmental reasons, the amount of seasoning added on the road is slightly less. Eating too much salt will make you thirsty easily.
Lu Shiyu picked up a piece with chopsticks. The taste was generally fine. All he had to do next was add water and simmer it.
"It would be nice if we could have some wine." Lu Shiyu smacked his lips.
"Wine?" Yan Hong thought Lu Shiyu wanted to drink with the rabbit meat as a side dish, so she took out a bottle of beer from her bag and handed it to Lu Shiyu: "Here, I prepared a few bottles before leaving."
"It really exists? Thanks!"
Lu Shiyu took the beer and happily poured the whole bottle into the pot. Yan Hong didn't even finish her words before there was only an empty bottle left.
Only the beer was still a little insufficient, so Lu Shiyu added some water, and it felt about right. He covered the pot and waited for the juice to collect.
Several people sat around the pot, smelling the aroma and waiting for the food to come out of the pot. This time, Lu Shiyu put in extra spices, and the taste was so delicious that it was tempting.
"It's not ready yet? I'm starving." Shaoxing Yang was so greedy that he almost got impatient. He wished the rabbit meat would jump into his mouth the next second.
When he was on the way, he lifted a corner of the pot lid, and when he felt it was about time, he opened the lid.
White steam instantly gushed out of the pot, and when the steam dissipated, the golden delicacy in the pot was presented to everyone.
The thick broth in the pot was still bubbling, and the rabbit meat, coated in the amber sauce, trembled. Lu Shiyu used a spatula to stir the rabbit meat to evenly distribute the meat, further spreading the aroma. Shao Xingyang even felt himself wrapped in the aroma of the braised rabbit meat.
"It's almost done," Lu Shiyu casually stuck the spatula into the pot: "Let's eat."
Everyone was already impatient, even the more steady Chen Yunliang couldn't help himself and immediately picked up his chopsticks as soon as Lu Shiyu gave the order.
The rabbit, stewed to a tender tenderness, tears easily between teeth, neither dry nor tough. Its salty and spicy flavor dominates, followed by a subtle sweetness, as if each strand of meat is soaked in the delicious broth. Even after swallowing the rabbit, a lingering taste remains, and the sticky sauce makes you want another piece.
"It's delicious!" Shao Xingyang reached out his chopsticks to pick up another piece before he even finished swallowing it. He spoke vaguely, "It tastes better than the big restaurant we had at the base before!"
"It's much better than that crappy restaurant," Yan Hong sniffed at the spiciness and continued to complain, "The food at that crappy restaurant is just average, but they dare to charge so much! I don't know how a place like that can stay open."
Chen Yunliang picked up a piece of rabbit leg and said, "Really? I don't think that restaurant is very expensive."
"Your family is so rich, of course you think it's a bargain." Yan Hong muttered.
Chen Yunliang smiled helplessly: "What does my family's wealth have to do with me? I was kicked out of the house a long time ago."
Lu Shiyu sensed the air of gossip and decisively interrupted the topic: "Kicked out of the house? Why?"
Shao Xingyang was the first to answer: "It's because he has a good life, but he insisted on signing up to join the exploration team as an explorer."
"My family thought the job was too risky and threatened to disown me if I insisted on signing up."
Lu Shiyu said: "That must be what he said in anger. Maybe he was just worried about you."
Chen Yunliang shook his head. "No, they really want to sever ties with me because they feel that if someone like me, who is seeking his own death, were to inherit the family fortune, it would be ruined soon."
Lu Shiyu didn't know how to respond for a moment. As an outsider, it was not appropriate for her to comment on other people's family affairs.
"It would be nice if we had some bread." Tang Zeyu suddenly spoke up.
"Noodles?"
"Hmm," Tang Zeyu said, "Have you ever tried iron pot stew? In addition to the vegetables in the center of the pot, they also stick pancakes all over the edge of the pot. They taste really good after being soaked in the soup."
Lu Shiyu remembered that her parents seemed to have taken her there to eat once when she was a child, but the memory was a bit distant.
"I've had it!" Shaoxing Yang responded enthusiastically, "It's really, really delicious! I like stewed pork ribs and stewed chicken, but I've never had stewed rabbit."
Yan Hong licked the sauce at the corner of her mouth: "It's a pity that the conditions don't allow it, otherwise I really want to eat it."
Chen Yunliang shrugged and said, "That's nothing we can do. Let's eat it after we get back to the base."
The five of them sat around the pot, talking and laughing, chatting about random things while eating hot braised rabbit meat. The atmosphere was so good that it seemed as if they were not here to carry out a mission but to camp in the wild. The steaming hot food warmed not only the stomachs but also the hearts of the diners.
Thanks to this pot of braised rabbit meat, everyone slept particularly soundly that night, feeling warm and comfortable all over.
Early the next morning
Lu Shiyu put the half pot of rabbit meat left over from yesterday into a small stainless steel thermal box with a lid. Several people each took a few pieces of rabbit meat and ate while walking. Although the meat was cold, they were not picky people and they still enjoyed the cold meat.
But the way they seemed to like everything made Lu Shiyu wonder whether they had shown such enjoyment of food because the food was really delicious or they simply ate everything.
As the distance increased, the surrounding trees became noticeably denser. What was initially a sparse grove now looked like an uninhabited mountain forest - although it was indeed uninhabited.
After walking for such a long time, Shi Yu also began to get used to the high-intensity weight-bearing hiking every day. Tang Zeyu wanted to help her carry the backpack for a while but was rejected.
"It's not that heavy, actually. I can carry it myself," Lu Shiyu said. "Captain Tang, thank you so much for carrying my backpack for me a few days ago. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to walk at all."
"Don't be so polite. If you can walk faster, you'll also increase the speed of the team."
"Also, that," Tang Zeyu touched her neck shyly and said, "You can actually just call me by my name."
"Why?"
Lu Shiyu also suddenly noticed that she called everyone else by their names, and everyone else also started to call her by her name, except Tang Zeyu. She kept calling the other party Captain Tang, which seemed particularly strange, but the other party was obviously helping her.
"Sorry, I just thought it would be more formal."
After all, the two of them are in an employment relationship, and Tang Zeyu is her current boss.
"We don't have to be so formal with each other," Tang Zeyu said. "We're teammates now, right?"
"Um."
Shaoxing Yang, who was not far away, was holding a long-eaten bone in his mouth. He looked at the two people chatting and said to Yan Hong beside him, "Hey, what are they whispering about?"
"Want to know? Then come over and listen."
"I don't want it," Shao Xingyang took the bone from his mouth and said, "What if the captain gets angry if we find out?"
As a group of people were walking, a fork in the road suddenly appeared in front of them.
There was a road on each side. Everyone stopped at the fork in the road and waited for Tang Zeyu to choose a road to continue.
Tang Zeyu took out the map. As expected, he couldn't get much information from the map. Tang Zeyu drew a "Y" at their current location and then put the map away.
Tang Zeyu looked to both sides. The road on the left was overgrown with weeds, narrow and steep, while the road on the right was relatively flat, with fewer branches.
"The road here must have been opened by humans. Let's go this way."
The group headed towards the road on the right. Even though it was a road that had been walked on by people, it was still difficult to walk on. Not only were there all kinds of weird-looking deformed plants around, but they also had to be careful of the small deformed creatures that might jump out of the weeds and attack at any time.
What you fear will come to you. Tang Zeyu raised a hand to signal everyone to stop, and squinted his eyes to look ahead. In the dense grass, a few wild grasses were moving without wind, making a faint rustling sound. Something was approaching them.
Tang Zeyu drew out his long knife and cut through a patch of weeds with one swing. He then went ahead to explore the way and check the situation.
The thing seemed to know that Tang Zeyu had discovered it, and began to stop moving.
The thing didn't run away until Tang Zeyu swung his knife in front of it, which made Tang Zeyu even more nervous. But when he pushed aside the weeds, he saw only a thin vine.
What's this?
wrong!
Tang Zeyu instantly realized that he had been tricked. The people waiting for Tang Zeyu in the back were still concentrating their attention and waiting for Tang Zeyu's reaction, and did not notice that a huge monster was rising from the weeds in the back.
The first person to sense the danger was Yan Hong. Her sixth sense was the strongest in the Eagle Squad and had never been wrong, so the moment she sensed it, she shouted without hesitation:
"Run to both sides!"
After shouting, he pulled Lu Shiyu to the side. Lu Shiyu didn't even react. When he turned around, he saw a thick vine lying on the ground.
"What is that?"
When Yu Zhen was on the road, he raised his head in shock. Only after he moved upwards did he see the whole picture of the thing that attacked them.
This is actually a huge flower!
□□It grows along the trunk like a vine, clinging to the tree, while the flower itself is hidden in the tree canopy, so when a few people just walked by, they didn't notice it, thinking it was just an ordinary vine, and didn't think of it as a flower at all.
This flower seemed to regard them as prey. Flowers that looked like the queen of flowers poked out from the tree canopy, and countless vines were ready to catch them and turn food into nutrients to nourish the flowers.
"Damn it! These plants actually have the ability to hunt on their own," Yan Hong said, slashing a vine that was attacking them with her knife. "How dare they treat us as prey? They don't know how to live or die."
Shao Xingyang, wielding two swords, easily dispatched the vines, but more vines soon followed, crawling in from all directions. Those that were severed didn't die immediately, merely losing a section. The overwhelming vines seemed endless. When the number of vines that appeared exceeded the number they had cut, the group was inevitably surrounded.
Lu Shiyu felt a little itchy on her foot, and the next moment she felt that her leg had lost strength. She looked down and found that a thin vine had quietly wrapped around her ankle without her noticing!
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