Yu Rujia scooped some water into a bucket and placed it in front of Duoshou, asking him to put the fish into the bucket to keep them alive.
Yu Rujia: "This fish weighs more than four pounds. It's hard to catch such a big fish in the river. Small fish have too many bones and are not suitable for making hot pot. Let's use this fish to make hot pot."
Now that the internet is online, there's no need to stick your head out of the water to watch the fish anymore. Duole no longer needs his older brother. With a clumsy turn of his chubby little body, he finds a slightly better spot to stand and watch his two older brothers catch fish.
Dole nodded, seemingly understanding but not quite, in support of her mother: "A good pot, this fish will be used to make a pot."
Duofu caught a carp weighing over a pound: "This fish has a lot of bones. We'll use the fillet part to make a pot, and the rest we'll use to make soup this morning."
Yu Rujia: "If we want to have fish this morning, we have to go back early. If we go too late, Duolu and the others might have already prepared soup."
Dorje asked expectantly, "I wonder what dishes my second and fourth brothers will cook this morning? Will they take out the braised meat from yesterday?"
They don't serve dishes at home; what's served is entirely decided by the people on duty, just like guessing a blind box.
Of course, if there are fresh ingredients that are taken back before the shift workers start cooking, they will usually cook them.
At the Yu family home, after finishing the dishes and cleaning, Duolu and Duoxi were discussing the menu.
A family needs at least four meat dishes, two vegetable dishes, and a soup for every meal. The ingredients are limited, and the same dish is generally not made twice within two days, except when it is fresh. Therefore, coming up with a menu is a hassle.
Duoxi: "I didn't make stir-fried pork intestines yesterday, so it can be considered a dish. I ate cumin lamb yesterday, but I don't usually eat this dish, so I'll make it this morning."
Doro shook his head and rejected a dish: "Lamb is the highlight of tonight, so don't make any lamb dishes this morning."
Duoxi: "Then let's have crispy pork belly."
Duolu still rejected the idea: "Pork belly is also the main dish tonight, so we don't need that; there's no rabbit meat for tonight's hot pot, and we still have one rabbit left from the previous days that we haven't finished cooking, so let's make a spicy rabbit stew."
Duoxi: "There's chicken in the hot pot tonight, so we can't cook the chicken?"
Duolu: "If we don't make chicken, we can make spicy and sour chicken giblets."
Duoxi: "That's good. With the braised pork, we already have four out of five meat dishes. We just need to think of one more. How about stir-fried pork belly?"
Braised pork is a troublesome dish to make, and it's only made a few times a year. In Yu's family, it's a rare delicacy that the whole family loves to eat, and it's not on the menu that can't be repeated every two days.
Therefore, Duoxi took out the braised meat that he had made yesterday and counted it as a meat dish.
Duolu was in a dilemma: "I was thinking of adding pig's stomach when I made the hot pot tonight."
Pig stomach is used to make hot pot. It is soft, chewy and crisp, full of solid meat texture, which is irresistible. It is one of the favorite ingredients in the Yu family when making hot pot.
The country bumpkin Wei Han sat to one side listening to the menus, and once again felt that he, who had lived for more than ten years, was not as knowledgeable as two children under ten years old.
He had never eaten any of the dishes they listed; he had lived in vain.
These vegetables either come from the mountains or are free. Apart from offal, he has handled or had contact with all the other ingredients. Why didn't he think of this before?
Seeing the two children's dilemma, Wei Han said, "We don't need five meat dishes, four is enough. Let's have one more vegetable dish."
In fact, four meat dishes were already a lot for Wei Hanjie. Even in his family in the capital, except for special occasions, there were usually only two meat dishes.
Even though today is Lunar New Year's Eve, we'll only have a decent meal in the evening; breakfast and lunch will be the same as usual.
So he felt that four meat dishes were already plenty, and there was no need to force himself to make up for another meat dish.
Duolu: "Meat dishes are meat dishes, and vegetable dishes are vegetable dishes. Today's lunch is five meat dishes, two vegetable dishes, and a soup."
Normally there are four meat dishes, but today there was an extra one – a Wei-Han dish. After all, they brought a whole sheep, so we had to have an extra dish for the meal.
Duo Xi: "The only vegetarian dishes were garlic-flavored bok choy and braised tofu. I didn't eat them yesterday."
Doro: "Hmm, that works. Now we just need a soup and a meat dish. Let me think about it some more."
The two thought of a few more meat dishes, but they were all rejected. Just as they were hesitating, a group of people who had been catching fish outside returned.
The two children said at the same time, "Fish soup?"
Doro stepped outside: "Let's go, let's go see how many fish they brought back."
Yu Rujia and her group caught three fish at the first spot, and released all the ones weighing less than half a pound.
They moved to several other places and caught a total of nine fish. The largest was a grass carp weighing over four pounds, and the smallest was a crucian carp weighing over half a pound. The total weight was over twenty pounds.
Upon returning home, as soon as I entered the courtyard, I was greeted by two pairs of detector lights, each over 100 watts in wattage.
Duoxi craned his neck to look into the bucket: "Wow, so many fish! We have fish soup now, and we can also make a dish with the fish."
Fish are only caught every few days, unlike the prey that can be hunted in the mountains, so it doesn't matter if there's a slight conflict between the morning and afternoon.
Duolu looked at the bucket for a while, then chuckled and started making arrangements: "We'll use the head and tail for the fish soup, and the fish fillets for a hot pot tonight. Let's make a braised fish offal dish. There aren't enough fish offal from nine fish, so let's add some fish meat to make up a dish."
Duo Shou laughed and said, "You guys must have racked your brains trying to come up with a menu, right?"
As someone who's been through it all, Duoshou knows all too well the trouble of planning a menu. Every day, lunch and dinner together need at least eight meat dishes, and you can't repeat them for two days in a row, which means sixteen dishes.
With only so many ingredients at home, it's really tough on them to come up with a new menu that avoids more than ten dishes.
Therefore, they don't have the habit of ordering food from a menu. If they did, the people on shift would have one less dish to think of. It's better to save the dish names for when they're cooking.
Duoxi: "Yes, my second brother said that the ingredients we'll be using in the pot tonight can't be used this morning. We thought about it for a long time and only came up with four meat dishes."
Duofu: "It's eleven o'clock now. I'll clean the fish. You guys prepare the other dishes first."
Wei Han greeted the group that had returned, and then watched as the Yu family's several big kids each picked up a knife, and gathered around the hand pump well with fish and various other ingredients they would need for lunch.
Duo Shou deftly stunned the fish, and Duo Fu picked up a fish and quickly scraped off its scales, then bled it and removed its bones.
The fish were all stunned, and Duoshou then picked up a knife and took the fish meat that Duofu had put aside to slice it.
Thin, almost transparent slices of fish were sliced off.
Duo Xi was washing vegetables on the side, occasionally using a knife to clean the stubborn dirt off the vegetables;
Duolu cut the vegetables that Duoxi had washed into the shapes he wanted, his movements were just as smooth and efficient as those of the chefs at the state-run restaurant.
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